Anatomy of A Street

Eszter Steierhoffer & Levente Polyk
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Anatomy of a Street:
an introduction

Welcoming Cities
The London Festival of Architectures theme, Welcoming
Cities, is open to a variety of interpretations: of cities
welcoming the Olympic Games, as well as cities welcoming
initiatives, diversity and eventually conflict. The Anatomy
of a Street project poses the question somewhat differently:
what if large-scale cultural or sporting events affect
cities in far more diverse ways than we expect? How
does the actual change taking place differ from the
anticipated urban effects, and what are the side-effects
of top-down, large-scale urban development? Do events
or regeneration simply contribute to the process of
gentrification and commercialisation of cities or, on the
contrary, do they bring about complex bundles of effects
and counter-effects?

Anatomy of a Street an on-going research
programme linking initiatives in Budapest, Pcs, London,
Warsaw and Bratislava is a proposal to take a closer
look at these phenomena. The case studies of the AoaS
project are locations in cities where top-down national
or municipal planning, corporate development, small
businesses and bottom-up initiatives of the civic sphere
intersect, interact and create unique forms. The AoaS
project questions some of the general assumptions that
describe the relationship between public, private,
civic and corporate elements in their effect on the city.

National contributions to architecture festivals and
biennials have consisted traditionally of declarations of
pride, and showcases of great architectural achievements
in order to position nations in an internationalised
competition for attention, investments and commissions.
Contrary to this, the AoaS project draws its inspiration
Anatomy of a Street: an introduction
from critical studies examining the way how architecture

is embedded in social, political and economic contexts,
and how architectural objects and symbols can be
described and decoded in specific local settings, as well
as in broader global networks. The case studies streets
from various locations differ geographically, historically
and culturally, as well as architecturally. Notwithstanding
this colourful variety, there is still a shifting degree of
resemblance and interconnections informed by the global
exchange of concepts, real estate and capital.

Anatomy of a Street takes the position of what may
be called research architecture.1
In this case, the study of a single street, a restricted area

cut deliberately from its urban context. In this setting,
the analysis may result in a distorted, yet condensed
view of Budapest, Pcs and London, revealing complex
Connections inherent in the detail. Statistics of demography
and local economy may provide a clear picture of general
trends and tendencies at large; however, they may also
obscure processes at the micro-scale. Without distrusting
statistics and their revelatory force, we chose to provoke
an encounter between statistical and phenomenological
evidence, by defining uncommon cultural, social and
economic indicators.3
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1 Research architecture,
an undefined but overused
term, here refers to studies
of social, geographical
and political processes

which architecture
engenders, facilitates
or impedes. See David
Gissen, Architectures
Geographic Turns. In Log
12, Spring/Summer 2008,
New York, ANY.
In order to investigate the global dimension of changes,

we propose to look at cities on the micro-level and
explore them in a comparative manner. The starting point
for the AoaS is therefore a search for local answers
to globally relevant questions.

To diversify a methodological urban study, we opened
up the project to flexible approaches. We invited artists
and designers to investigate aspects of urban change, and
developed our inquiry into a travelling exhibition that
takes the form of a series of study trips both driving
and feeding back to our research. The project is asymmetrically divided between the research workshops,
the publication and the exhibition. Balancing between
documentation and open-ended mapping processes, we
consider research in the form of an exhibition, and vice
versa, exhibition in the form of research.

Anatomy
Anatomy is the scientific study of bodily structure (),
a detailed examination or analysis.2
2 Oxford English
Dictionary
3 We borrowed the term

uncommon economic
indicators from WNYC
journalist Brian Lehrers
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crowdsourcing initiatives.
http://beta.wnyc.org/
shows/bl/
Walking down the street and looking at the streetscape,

the signs, shapes, colours and lights, street furniture
and advertisements, the old shops and new ones, the
local off-license, merchants, residents and passersby, the local paper, real-estate signs, vacant lots and
empty buildings, hidden gardens, rooftops, street corners
and open doorways, local cafes, restaurants, pubs and
galleries, monuments and landmarks, sites of memory
or fame, does, of course, offer much more than pure
phenomenological experience. It opens up and delineates
boundaries and different territories, and allows for
glancing into parallel microcosms that co-exist beside,
across and on top of one other.

The street enters the global exchange circuit
through hidden processes: the task is to identify some
of the mechanisms that made these streets became
what they are today. To anatomise the unconscious
infrastructure of social and cultural phenomena, and to
analyse the underlying forces that generate changes
in the chosen neighbourhoods requires the skills both
of an ethnographer and a cartographer. Ethnology
and cartography in this sense are the undertaking
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of locating the global and situating the universal, so

that its mechanisms are unveiled. As the philosopherethnologist Bruno Latour reminds us, Politics is not
revolution but clarification, that is, the unfolding
of artificial elements that we have not been aware of,
on which we depend to exist. Politics, in other words,
is a question of air conditioning, the progressive
recognition that we live together within compounds
that are as little natural as greenhouses, and
the mechanisms of which appear to us bit by bit.4
4 Bruno Latour, Paris,
ville invisible: Le Plasma.
In Catalogue Airs de
Paris, ditions du Centre

Pompidou, 2007, p.262.

The Street as Indicator,

the Street as Metaphor
The Anatomy of a Street project departs from the
assumption that there is a methodological advantage in
looking at a delineated area of the city and measuring
change by analysing symptoms surfacing in the urban
street. The idea of looking at a particular neighbourhood
or a singular street to grasp changes of the whole city
draws its inspiration from a variety of sources: the street
has long been a philosophical, literary and political topos,
the birthplace of ideas, movements and actions, and
a generator of specific registers of perception, maintaining
a dis-equilibrium between seeing and being seen.5
5 Richard Sennett,
The Conscience of the Eye.
New York, Knopf, 1991.
The street is more than a simple type of public space:

situated outside of the frequently evoked dichotomy
between space and place, the street is, unlike the square
or the highway, simultaneously lieu et espace, space
and place.

Certainly, the street cannot model the whole city.
So what is the use of looking at a street as if it were
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more than just a street a model concentrating the

mechanisms that shape and constantly re-configure
the city? In its linearity, the urban main street or high
street (often more so than large avenues) gives passersby the sensation of having their finger on the pulse
of the whole city. Undoubtedly, there are neighbourhoods,
blocks or streets that concentrate signs and symptoms
of change in a particular way, thus accumulating symptoms
of transformation and giving observers the opportunity
to measure changes in their phenomenological
directness. Like a gauge or a litmus test, or functioning
as a barometer, the street may be seen as the
smallest unit where complex urban tendencies can
be observed and deciphered.
Of course, to consider the part as containing (or at least
indicating) the whole is a tradition whose implications
go further than the parameters of the AoaS project.
Fromcenturies-old philosophical ideas compatible with
theorisations of contemporary science and technology,
like Leibnizs monadology, to literary forms, such as
narratologys mise-en-abme or synecdoche, looking
innovatively at the relationship between the part and
the whole still opens a fertile ground for the investigation
of various cultural phenomena and the city.

Sometimes the street is a mere metaphor, an idea
of community, of authenticity, of sparkling urban life,
of a sense of adaptation, of street-smartness. Among
thenumerous cultural undertakings that deal with the
street metaphor, a most recent source of inspiration
is the collaborative media project, Mapping Main Street,
launched in the United States in 2008, aiming to
deconstruct the generalising notion of Main Street, as
opposed to Wall Street, in post-mortgage breakdown
political discourses.6
6 http://www.mapping
mainstreet.org/

Kirly and Church Streets
Our choice of Budapests Kirly Street (King Street) in
exploring aspects of Budapests post-Socialist urban
transformation is based on its history and location within
the inner neighbourhoods of Budapest. Unlike any
other neighbourhoods in the historic core which follow
the beaten path of gradual privatisation, renovation
and consequently gentrification it seems as if Kirly
Streets population has worked hard on enumerating
the widest variety of arguments for and against specific
directions in development, and correspondingly, for
and against specific ways of urban living. A swinging
street, in the sense that it cannot engage either
with the vision that owners of the proliferating design
stores paint on its face, or with the values alternative
youth culture associates with it, or with the survival
economy of second-hand stores.

Kirly Street is an incubator, where all the current
plans for the city are constantly brought into question:
mechanisms of corruption or citizen self-organisation,
of new developments and heritage protection are tested
here. New design and art galleries, squats and ruin bars,
second-hand stores and food markets quickly emerge
and disappear in this neighbourhood, thus ceaselessly
drawing, shifting and re-drawing frontlines between
different visions for the city. This is where words such as
development and heritage become floating signifiers,
used and abused by any occasional argumentative
context.

Pcss Kirly Street is somewhat different, but is
similar in its many aspects. The main street of a mediumsized Hungarian town, one would expect Kirly Street to
be the showcase of what the citys commercial capacity
can offer to residents, as well as to tourists: a dense retail
district, where strolling is always about discovering new
places and meeting new people.

There are many reasons why Kirly Street is not like
that. The economic crisis, combined with the heightened
commercial expectations of the municipality in anticipation

of the citys 2010 European Capital of Culture status,
have left some parts of the street devastated. Due to the
lack of flexibility in the rental policy and the lack of
differentiation in rental fees (according to the leasers
status and profitability), empty storefronts and buildings
wait hopelessly for those who can afford the high
rental fees. However, as on its Budapest counterpart,
Kirly Streets empty buildings do not remain
disaffected for long periods: civic initiatives contributed
to the mushrooming of alternative cultural venues and
a flourishing garden culture in the neighbourhood.

What are the similarities between Paddingtons
Church Street and these two high streets in Hungary?
Mainly its variety and divisions, the mixture of council
housing and Georgian, Victorian faades. The contrast
between the two ends of the street: the daily street
market, off-license stores, cheap coffee shops, fast-food
restaurants; and the high-profile antique stores, new
design galleries and fancy cafs. As if an invisible hand
drew a line between the two parts: alike in Budapest
and Pcs, where the two faces of the streets reveal
differing visions, whose long-term compatibility may
be desirable and improbable.

Despite its central location (only minutes away
from Regents Park, Marylebone, Paddington, Hyde Park
and Marble Arch) Church Street is a hidden world
trapped between the heavily trafficked Edgware Road,
the canal and the railway network. Despite neighbouring
the most expensive areas of London, Church Street
counts as one of the poorest locations of Europe, with
the highest numbers of unemployment, poverty and
illiteracy. This often blamed isolation is, however, the
very reason that made it possible to obtain and preserve
one of the most precious qualities: a unique local feel
to a street with a global mixture of communities and multicultural groups. Questions posed by the AoaS project
about contrasting visions gentrification, preservation
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102
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and regeneration, privatisation and globalisation,

commercialisation and secularisation become highly
relevant in relation to the current master-planning
processes and other initiatives for regeneration that are
there to shape Church Streets future in the long term.

How does the localisation of the global, and the
globalisation of the local occur? and how do they
contribute to the dynamics involved in the emergence
and maintenance of intra-neighbourhood contrasts
that tend toward the constitution of borders? To find
answers to this question, we both looked at the
chosen streets as particular, local entities, and juxtaposed impressions and reflections, objects and artefacts
found in the two Kirly Streets and Paddingtons
Church Street in London.

Belatedness and Transfer
Ideas often travel faster than contexts. While there
is a single terminology to describe and analyse
urban phenomena, it is worth taking a closer look at
seemingly inconsequential details that might alter the
way privatisation, gentrification, commercialisation or
secularisation are brought about in different locations.

A common thread followed by researchers and
theorists of the post-Socialist urban condition was the
question of path-dependence.7
7 G. Andrusz, M. Harloe,
and I. Szelenyi (eds), Cities
after Socialism, Oxford,

Blackwell, 1996
The arguments defending the idea of path-dependency

claimed that cities that have lived through an important
period of Socialist-type political and economic governance
will not find their way back to the kind of development
that Capitalist cities have experienced: they will face
evolutions which will always depend on their previous
development path. Counter-arguments denied the
importance of the Socialist path: they claimed that the
globalised nature of urban economies forces every
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city to respond to similar requirements, and thus to follow

a converging path.

Without offering any evidence for the case of
path-dependency, one must acknowledge the important
differences in the rhythm of transformation between
Western and Eastern European cities. Natural disasters,
major political and economic tendencies set a global
scale and time in Europe; however, the centres and
peripheries, or the Western vs. Eastern (post-Socialist)
bloc function and move according to different rhythms.
This difference lies not only in the accelerated pace of
transition following the radical political and economic
changes of the early 1990s and the consequent rapid
liberalisation of real-estate markets, but also to shortcuts caused by the de-synchrony between development
plans and socio-economic conditions.8
8 For example, while the
use of vacant spaces and
shops in Budapest or Pcs
is promoted exclusively
by grassroot initiatives
(just like it used to be in

London a few decades
ago), the same thing in
London is now a top-down
facilitated, institutionalized
process (with the tax

cuts, Special Arts Council
Grants, etc.)

For instance, gentrification in its classical sense, as
a process led by non-established young artists, cultural
activists and freelance intellectuals (while being followed
closely by real-estate developers), does not exist in the
same form in post-Socialist cities. In Budapest, inner city
neighbourhoods, however dilapidated, have never been
unappealing for developers. From the first moment of the
opening of the real-estate market, developers who were
conscious of real estate tendencies in the West started
investing in neighbourhoods that according to the theory
of gentrification were expected to rise. New housing
arrived in areas still consisting of degraded buildings, thus
creating sharp contrasts between long-time residents
and newcomers, without the relative continuity of the
process of gentrification.

Anatomy of a Street:

the exhibition and the catalogue
Contrasts, belatedness, parallels and synchrony are among
the main questions that the Anatomy of a Street exhibition
and publication raises, while addressing the evolution
of various examples of the European high street.
On the occasion of the London Festival of Architecture,
Paddington is the first venue of the AoaS exhibition,
a nomadic project unfinished by definition, which will
travel to and learn from such cities as London, Warsaw,
Bratislava and Budapest.
it nearly impossible to follow the circulation of money

and real estate.

Another section of the publication comprises an
inventory of artworks that fed into our research. There
is the photographic archive of Emoke Kerekess and Anna
Mzess portraits of the shopkeepers in Kirly Street.
Pter Rkosis series collects theatrical displays of the
everyday, and documents shop-windows in the Kirly
Streets of Budapest and Pcs. Mikls Surnyis series
of temporarily inhabited spaces is a poetic but precise
documentation of the overlooked, the imprints of everyday
activities. Maps designed by Tmea Csaba and Gergely
Kovcs visualise the internal borders of Budapests Kirly
Street neighbourhood, using data based on the research
of university students of the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts
and Design and the Budapest Technical University.

The inspiration for the AoaS project came from Kirly
Street, with the proposal for local research and a travelling
exhibition that gathers material and experiences from
different locations before finally coming back and taking
place on the very site from which the first impulse
originated. Our first venue for the exhibition, Church Street
in London, came to us in a natural, almost unintentional
way. We first arrived as strangers and wanderers, in the
course of two and a half months, gradually becoming
familiar and natural to the street, moving in and setting up
our temporary office on Church Street.*
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The publication is designed to complement the exhibition,

offering historical, sociological and political insight
into the forces that produce Kirly and Church Streets.
In the first edition, the essay by Edwin Heathcote sets
the tone for a comparative approach between the chosen
streets, focusing on their architecture as shaped by the
constantly shifting political and economic circumstances.
Deepa Naik and Trenton Oldfield, founders of TIANG
(This is Not a Gateway) reflects upon its members
personal involvements in research and activism. Allan
Siegel evokes the images of the large constructions
of Pcs, in the wake of its European Capital of Culture
season, while Csaba Ders delves into a deeper analysis
of the towns principal street, Kirly Street. In his short
reflection, Pter Lowas explores Pcss self-organised
cultural networks in relation to municipal development
plans. A text by Bla Kli introduces the complexities of
post-Socialist real-estate management. Lszl Muntean
analyses claims of heritage protection in a context where
the notion of heritage becomes a weapon in an ideological
battle. Gab Bartha tells the story of the activist group
KAP-HT that succeeded in preserving the local open-air
food market. dm Alberts network visualisation depicts
the mechanisms of complex transactions that helped
local municipalities outsource public property by making
* We owe special thanks

to the team of Church
Street Neighbourhood
Management for all their
help and enthusiastic
collaboration. Thanks
must also go to all those
who provided the space
(shop) windows, walls,
rooftops, cabinets, shelves,
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tables and TV screens to

host our exhibition on and
about Church Street.
Two letters from Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad and the House

of Jonn are the documentation of a work-in-progress
of research on-site, observations and early proposals of
this period.
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Based on the regular visits and conversations with
the traders and visitors of the market, Aubergine NW8
is a project by Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad, a market stall for
exchange of food and ideas (the cross-culturally popular
staple ingredient aubergine for humble home-cooking
recipes) seeking to explore and further understand the
ethnically diverse community that surrounds and benefits
from Church Street Market.

House of Jonns proposal, a gallery-guide system
(map, audio-guide and way-finders), is linked to the idea
of bringing the gallery to the street, as well as it is a
playful reference to the walks of the Situationists, a map
and audio-guide linking London with Budapest. Interviews
conducted and used in this audio-guide informed
profoundly our understanding of the street and the
making of this exhibition.

While writing this introduction, the exhibition is still
being shaped. Its final evaluation is entrusted to the visitor
and will be the task of the second chapter, the next edition
of our travelling inquiry.
Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad
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From: Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad

Date: 03 May 2010 02:18
Subject: Re: furniture
To: Steierhoffer Eszter
Hi Eszter,
As you know I have been thinking about designing
elements for the street restaurant. Well, after some
research, observation and good old model-making, I have
an idea that could work very nicely.
I am not really
designing furniture
but extending on the
vernacular use of
the crate within the
market. There is a
certain crate that is used in almost all London street
markets, I have seen it from Dalston, to Deptford to
Church street: the Sunblest bread baskets, as they are
called. All of which were used originally for bread,
but most of which today are used for anything but
bread. They are used vertically, horizontally, upsidedown, stacked, nested etc. Currently heavy large boards
are required to be placed on top of these bread baskets
to provide a stable flat surface.
I want to make an additional element that can be

dropped into the diamond shaped holes to provide this
flat surface. Something in the line of a flexible rug
made from wood and held together using strapping tape
(pictured). The picture shows some pieces of paper I
have placed (instead of the 15mm thick wooden diamonds)
to illustrate the idea. These filled crates can then
be used as a bench and a table.
We can discuss in detail tomorrow.
Bahbak
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Subject: Furniture/Aubergine NW8
House of Jonn
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From: Nicholas Lobo Brennan

Date: 12 May 2010 09:50
Subject: Gallery Ephemera
To: Steierhoffer Eszter
Hi Eszter,
After looking at Church Street and the
description of the Anatomy of a Street
project we wondered what happens to the
street when it becomes a gallery, and what
happens to the gallery when it become a
street.
Our key concerns were both the apparatus of gallery
and Church Street, and how they meet. So our idea is
to produce the actual AoaS gallery guidance system
ephemerathe map, the audio guide, the way finder.
The project time limit means that the production of the
gallery like paraphernalia will be the vehicle to learn
about Church Street itself, which we like.
Let me know if you want more details of the actual

elements we will produce. I have attached some photos
of Church Street which show some of the observations.
We can discuss them too,
Nick
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Subject: Gallery Ephemera
Edwin Heathcote
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Church and King

The point where Church Street spills into the roaring
Roman Road of Edgware appears an exemplar of
urban dysfunction and a crushing critique of Londons
particular brand of anti-urbanism. Yet, this is a cityscape
of infinite complexity, one of the most perfect ciphers
for the contemporary city in which globalisation informs
the street in every conceivable way.

This is the view from that corner. The mouth of the
street faces a huge hoarding and the behemoths of
Paddington Basins expanding fringes. This is the strange
world of Paddington Green, the citys de facto highsecurity police station, once the monopoly of the IRA , now
a drop-in shop for surveilled Muslims but also the Clashs
Westway, a stream of imagined modernity flowing through
the city. Church Street itself is delicately framed in
perfect symmetry by a pair of traffic lights and the guards
tunic colours or a matching pair of no entry signs.

The stucco Victorian terrace survives, set back from
the single storey shopfront extension of what was once
a mutualised building society but has now morphed into
the Spanish Banco Santander, its flame logo looking
deliciously like a mangal or grilled meat sign. Stucco?
said Groucho Marx of Floridas real estate boom,
O can you get stucco. The flush faades, stripped naked,
caked with plaster like bad foundation, turn the corner
into a mess of plastic shop-signs and ads for global phone
cards, this new calling-home industry announced
on its ad-hoc streetside boxes, the slightly more legal
equivalent of the sharps three-card-trick crate.
The garish signs segue perfectly into the dumb pale
faade of the Tesco Metro, one of Britains few remaining
home-grown global brands. The architecture which
frames this entrance to the world of Church Street is
defined at every conceivable scale. First, the resilient
Church and King
Edwin Heathcote
Victorian fabric which has survived absurd traffic schemes

and bombs, then the humane, Scandinavian-influenced
social housing of the immediate post-war period, which
modestly retains pitched roofs and window surrounds,
a few ghostly remnants of northern European tradition.
This gives way to more heroic applications, the ribbons
of modernist housing, determined in their horizontality to
create bands of social intercoursestreet, canopy,
terrace, elevated accessways. This is good, solid, selfeffacing urbanity; these near invisible structures prove
easily capable of handling bridal-wear shops, grocers and
caffs, permeable enough to accommodate the Middle
Eastern lifestyle, lived more on the street than in the shop,
yet robust enough to remain secure and to adapt.
Then this mid-moderne gives way to a less humane
version, brick cliffs and towers begin to disperse
the street, breaking up the plan though their sheer mass.

But between the housing and the pavement
emerges another language, an architecture of the inbetween. It is this articulation of street furniture
and mini-architecture which gives Church Street its
particular expression. The modernist blocks to either
side set a datum for the street. Fascias are capped
with concrete canopies so that the garish plastic lettering
doesnt infect the dignity of the housing above.
But equally, these devices create shelter and produce
a humanised scale which chimes with the stripy
canvas coverings of the market stands and the barrows.
This correspondence between building and the itinerant
architecture of the market creates a mid-scale which
is what makes this a part of a real city. But the scale of
this world is not limited to the market stands. There is
a complex ecosystem of things positioned at this scale.
There are three different species of phone box, from
the enclosed and glazed to the simple side-canopied.
The internationalism and relative poverty of parts of
the area and the proliferation of prostitutes advertising
cards (clients presumably do not want to have numbers
logged onto their mobile accounts) means that the

phone boxes are in greater use than they are elsewhere,
where they have become largely defunct.

A public toilet is dwarfed by the cliffs of social
housing which frame it. Its half timbering is a touching
reference to a bucolic, village green Englishness.
The last resort of mock Tudor applied to that most
English of building types. The streets are further flanked
by bubblegum dispensers, by mobile street signs,
by historicising bollards and signposts which bear no
relation to the post-war welfare built landscape in
which they stand.

Church Street gentrifies rapidly. The market stalls,
some of which sell chandeliers, others seemingly
attempting to sell spangly belly dancing outfits to the
hijab-clad Muslim ladies, peter out and give way to
antique modernist furniture shops and the indoor arcade
of Alfies. The last stall is a frothy coffee merchant,
a heavily gentrified intruder. Just as Benjamin perceived
In the arcades of Paris the decline of a particular
moment, but also a symbol of a certain kind of bourgeois
production and consumptionindustry and luxuryone
which generated the unsettling, occasionally jarringly
surreal juxtaposition of objects. Benjamin revelled
in the defunct goods and trades of the arcades, geared
towards a society that no longer existed, and outside
of their time, temporal as well as spatial passages. In the
self-conscious retro of Alfies, the effect is accelerated,
moderne cocktail classics redolent of an age where wives
were expected to greet their returning husbands with
a Martini, the layers are suffused not only with the residue
of time, but also endless layers of irony. Yet they do not let
us forget that these are relics of an age which cherished
modernity with an enthusiasm wholly lacking now.
The security of a future of progress has disappeared;
the ad-hoc aesthetic of the market outside has replaced
a vision of gleaming technology.
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90
Church and King
Edwin Heathcote

Parallels are tantalising: Church Street is at once as
globalised as anywhere in the world, yet resolutely local
in its particular blend of businesses and an architectural
aesthetic which results from an enlightened post-war
consensus and the uncertainty of a property market which
has difficulty sizing up the potential of a poor district on
the threshold of some of the most valuable and desirable
real estate in the world. The former Duke of York pub on
the corner of Gateforth Street is now inhabited by the
Lahore Restaurant (established 1970). Kirly Street (King
Street) in Budapest was, curiously, named after the
King of England. The Angol Kirly (English King) pub lent
the street its name. If there are other links, they are
through trade. Kirly Street was a centre of the citys rag
trade: a few of its haberdashers and fabric shops remain,
whilst Church Streets traders ply their brilliantly-coloured
fabrics from their stalls and shops. It was also a centre
of the citys Jewish community; bakeries and delis, now
catering as much or more for Israeli or American tourists
than for the locals, still dot the surroundings, whilst
the extraordinarily theatrical endless perspective of the
courtyards of the Gozsdu Udvar just off Kirly Street
give an insight into the density of the urban fabric on
the edge of the one-time ghetto.

Like Church Street, Kirly Street became an early
adopter design ghetto, now with VAMs design centre
bringing the corporate modernism of the big Italian
manufacturers to the city. Previously, it was a place of
small, smoky cafs and grudging service, Communist-era
stores with wonderfully unselfconscious window displays
of machine parts or sun-faded 1980s knitting patterns.
Now, in its blend of ruin pubs, design shops, kosher caffs
and pop-up stores, it has become more mainstream,
pandering to a sentimental image of its own dereliction.
The ruin pub, a particularly Budapest phenomenon,
sees bars inhabit the complex spaces of derelict
apartment blocks, using every room, from courtyard
to garret, to create a rolling sequence of space in which
the customer asserts his or her independence of the

formal city through a kind of drunken drive. It owes
more than a little to the pop-up bars of Berlin, which took
advantage of the urban carnage left by the vacation of the
swollen state apparatus of the East after its swallowing
up by the West. Dozens of properties, from Stasi offices to
police apartments, were left empty and appropriated by
enterprising entrepreneurs to create party spaces selling
cheap beer, which disappeared as quickly as they arrived,
their activity tracing frenetic patterns through the pockmarked fabric of the city, their movement ensuring they
stayed hip and cheap. The biggest of Budapests ruin
pubs have, of course, become institutionalised, and the
area around Kirly Street has become the epicentre of this
formalised informality. The pop up and ruin phenomena
highlight a number of contemporary concernsthey
are at once a subversion of the city fabric in the finest
Situationist tradition, whilst at the same time becoming
a formalised fetishisation of decay. They are a huge
hit with tourists who rail against the corporatisation of
Western Main Street, but who fail to acknowledge
their role in precisely the kind of gentrification which,
ultimately, leads to the arrival of the corporates.
Nevertheless, in their transformation of the hulks of the
nineteenth century city they do allow a penetration
into and an alternative reading of the interior spaces of
the city, which is unique and, in a voyeuristic way,
thrilling. There is an undoubted frisson in such subversion
of domesticity, but it is accompanied by a sadness
that the centre of the city is becoming less dense as
inhabitants move to the suburbs and spend their leisure
time at the mall.

Whether in Church Street or Kirly Street, there
is an ever-present danger in obsessing about the
decline of a particular version of the city. The growing
tendency to idolise authenticity is unavoidable in a
globalised, insecure, rapidly-changing and international
gentrifying urban realm. Until recently, Kirly Street
89
88
Church and King
Deepa Naik & Trenton Oldfield
with its Communist-era shopfronts and dusty displays,

its old time espresso bars and musty, decaying buildings,
presented a picture of a city stuck in a seemingly more
intimate urban milieu. Church Street too, with its buzz
and astonishing diversity of the kitsch and the utilitarian,
its seemingly exotic blend of shishas and hijabs
against a background of the architecture of the welfare
state, and tempered with the chic of its mid-century
moderne specialists, seems to have found an urban ideal.
But, as its rapid Islamicisation shows, the streetscape
is far from static.

The urge to preserve authenticity is powerful but
misleading: it is precisely the citys propensity for change
which keeps it alive, even if the process may be painful,
and even if our tendency towards the sentimentalisation
of an earlier era makes us yearn for the old days. Whether
the context is London or Budapest, that remembered
utopian city always seems to be something slipping from
our grip. We should instead relax, attempt to enjoy the city
while we can, and revel in its endless capacity to absorb
and adapt.
The Surreal Experience

of Trying to Address
Inequalities with the Logic that
Increased them
87
86
In the time I worked at Cityside Regeneration1

1 Cityside Regeneration
Ltd (Cityside) operated
in the West of Tower
Hamlets. Cityside was
a non-profit making
company and partnership
between the public,
private and community
sectors including Tower

Hamlets Council and the
Corporation of London.
It was established to
manage regeneration
programmes. Cityside
managed the Single
Regeneration Budget
Round 3 programme
Building Business
(1997-2002) and Round 5
programme, Connecting
Communities (1999-2004).
Corporation of London,
accessed on 1 June 2010.
the organisation had two different chairman; one was the

developer & co-landowner of Spitalfields Market 2,
2 Mike Bear, chairman of
Spitalfields Development
Group (SDG)
the other the soon to retire CEO of the company that

owned most of the land and buildings in Aldgate East.3
3 Director of Tishman
Speyer.
The other positions on the board comprised the seats

sat in by executives from nearby global banks, local
businessmen and New Labour politicians. The board
was almost always absent of influence from women and
from non-business orientated organisations. The board
was always absent of a dissenting voice that might
have challenged the hegemonic business orthodoxy.
The significant majority of the projects we worked in
neighbourhoods required an entrepreneurial business
approach as a result of an obligation, set by central
85
84
The Surreal Experience of Trying to Address
government, to secure at least 50% match funding from

non-government and non-charity sources for a project.
The result of this authority was the pervasive deployment
of business practices, business logics and business
lexicon. At this time people began to give themselves job
titles like Urban Renewal Creative or Creative Industries
Incubator Manager. Unsurprisingly both planning
applications for Aldgate East and the re-development
of Spitalfields Market as an office block went through the
planning process with ease, despite in the later case,
over 40,000 signatures being presented in an attempt to
prevent the creation of another new peninsula of financial
district style monoculture.

With capitalism left for the most part unchallenged
by the collapse of the Soviet Union it was injected
with a virulent new logic, often referred to, probably to
simplistically, as neo-liberalism. Every aspect of
work in urban regeneration started to fuse with the logic
of a western businessman with a new MBA . When
the regeneration programme, which had propelled over
300million of public and private money 4
of organisations and people undertaking projects critically

interrogating these processes, as well as a vast body of
knowledge being expanded by vigorous, unexpected and
heterogeneous agents.6
4 Unscientific calculation
of all regeneration
funding allocated to be
spent in the strip of land
abutting the City of London

from St Kathernines
Dock to Bethnal Green
between 19942004.
into the thin strip of geography abutting the eastern edge

of the Corporation of London came to a close, the
surreal experience of trying to address inequalities with
the logic that increased them, was made more peculiar
with the sacking and sunsquent police investiagtion of the
the two senior local authority regeneration officers.5
5 Nisar Ahmed and
David Richardson were
suspended then dismissed
from their senior posts
in January 2004. See

Regeneration and Renewal
Magazine, 24 January
2004. Nisar Ahmed was
jailed for 12 months for

theft. See courtnews.co.uk

Despite this picture of corrosion, collapse and
confusion, I was also aware due to personal network in
the locality and wider work context, of a multiplicity
6 Our professional and

voluntary experience has
spanned academic work,
regeneration project
management, activity on
committees and boards,
education projects on
housing estates and in
local schools, regeneration

initiatives and art in the
public sphere.
New cells of new knowledge were and are continuously

surfacing. This knowledge is generated and shared most
often from the ground up by those that inhabit the city,
those that work alongside them and those thinkers within
governments, think tanks or private companies that have
not been seduced into only promoting and enabling the
notion of erase, stretch, relinquish.7
7 Erase, stretch,
relinquish is introduced
here as a term to
summarise both the
thinking and the actions
leading built-environment
decision-making
processes. Rather than
re-using existing building
and making use of the
ideas put forward by local
residents, buildings are
demolished. Erasing
is understood as both
easier and more efficient.
Demolition produces an
empty canvas suitable

for an alien typology to
land. The new typology
stretches all aspects
of the site including
size, height and
programmingthe main
aim being to stretch
the profit margin for the
developer and the tax
revenues for the local
authority. Relinquish is
the stage when almost
everyone that has
benefited from stretching
moves on: the developer
either sells the site or

passes on management
responsibilities; the
local authority no longer
owns anything and
struggles to answer who
does own what or why
none of the facilities
promised have been
built; and the neighbours
relinquish or resign
themselves to the fact
that their neighbourhood
will never be what it could
have been.
The sites propagating new knowledge are most often

outside of the urban industry, and the agents of these
new possibilities and practices seem to come together
around shared notions of complexity, texture, rigour and
potentiality. Is it not time for a re-understanding and
re-formulation of the disciplines and, above all, of the
participants involved in making space? Is it not time
for urbanism to undergo a transformation similar to that
of sociology opened up through cultural studies, or
art history re-examined in the light of visual cultures?
83
82
Inequalities with the Logic that Increased them
This is not a moment to bemoan or to react against the

current structures that are thought limiting and limited, but
an opportunity to produce new conditions.
that the out-of-step between official knowledge and

on-the-ground realities was causing burning frustration
for many. Personal and professional experience in
a diversity of arenas brought us in contact with sites of
relevant, critical knowledge and practice. These sites
are often independent but also include clusters of
research groups and leaders within innovative companies
pushing out beyond their institutions. We were constantly
working alongside people with remarkable ideas and
projects that we thought colleagues in other fields should
know about. These were not binaries, but missed
opportunities resulting from a perceived isolation from
each other. Like others, we recognised the urgency,
desire and mutual need for barriers to be broken down,
for ideas to be made accessible and for an expanded
dialogue to begin. It was clear to us that a platform was
neededone that would circulate these multiple
fields and sites of knowledge. Encouraged by colleagues
and associates, we set out to create a platform that
would demonstrate the potential of coming together.

Arguing for an engagement with a range of
approaches and disciplines, thinkers like Stuart Hall,
Nicholas Mirzoeff persistently allow us avenues in
considering how to propose the city as a site of
knowledge and potentiality. Writing about the
A.c.a.d.e.m.y exhibition, Irit Rogoff asked: Where
are the unseen possibilities that already exist
within these spacesthe people who are already
working there and who bring together unexpected life
experiences and connections the paths outward
which extend beyond the museum, the spaces
and navigational vectors which are unexpectedly
plotted within it.12

This Is Not A Gateway
Every movement and action in a city is a negotiation, each
square foot belongs to a profit-making spreadsheet, every
design is reviewed, every notion of citizenship is contested.
The work of Michel Foucault8 and Gayatri Spivak9
8 See for example,
Michel Foucault, Discipline
and Punishment (Paris:
Gallimard, 1977).
9 See for example,

Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Death of a
Discipline (New York:
Columbia University
Press, 2005).
provides a useful lens to question power-knowledge

mechanisms, along with the exclusion and marginalisation
of certain groups resulting from the maintenance of
power within the urban industry. The question of how
we might approach these realities, as significantly more
people demand agency in their cities, has been guided
by the practices of both Saul Alinsky10 and Paulo Freire.11
10 See for example, Saul
Alinsky, Rules for Radicals:
A pragmatic primer for
realistic radicals (New
York: Vintage, 1989).
11 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy

of the Oppressed (New
York: Continuum, 2007).

Following Alinsky, the need to act arises from
recognising the world as it is. Research data from
UN-Habitat and Urban Age make explicit the significant
implications of urbanisation on peoples everyday
lives. Statistics detailing the number of tall buildings
constructed in Dubai and the accelerating concentration
of financial and political power in a handful of cities are
set against stomach dropping and clearly unacceptable
levels of poverty, injustice, monopolisation, collusion
and exploitation. Our discussions with those working
both within and outside spatial practices made it clear
12 Irit Rogoff, Turning,

e-flux Journal #0
www.e-flux.com/journal/
view/18
It is this curiosity and continual questioning how spaces

and knowledge can be unbound from established limits
The Surreal Experience of Trying to Address
Allan Siegel
and expectations that have informed our thinking.

We know that language frames thought and the
usefulness of visual culture can also be demonstrated
by a consideration of shifting terms such criticism,
critique and criticality, potentiality and actualisation;
terms that alter in convergence with the changing
conditions they seek to address. The significance of
this is not to deepen an understanding of a fixed object
of study, in this case the city, but rather to create the
possibility of prising open the field, making its complexities
explicit, and allowing for unexpected actors to propel
ideas forward.
Notes on
a Street in Transition
81
The full version of this

paper is available in
Critical Cities; Ideas,
Knowledge & Agitation
from Emerging Urbanits
Vol.1.
Volume 2 will be launched

in September 2010. Critical
Cities is published by
Myrdle Court Press.
80
During the course of a citys evolution, its thoroughfares

develop distinct characteristics and values signifying
their different profiles and functions. In this context, the
urban street is not too far removed from the trading
routes blazed from the wilderness or charted by mariners.
Decades ago, Jane Jacobs clarified why streets can be
more than simply pipelines transmitting people or things
from one place to the next. In contrast to their function
as basic transport mechanisms, in the most dynamic
situations they are organic entities.

Urbanists, planners, sociologists and city dwellers
have argued relentlessly about the qualities that make
one street resilient and alive while another is moribund
and desolate. Searching for some magical ingredient
to inject into the life blood of a citys atrophying elements,
they often invent panaceas that inadequately consider
the well-functioning dynamics of a public space. The results
become reductionist solutions that compress the
complexity of urban inter-relationships; often foregrounding
features of design at the expense of historical and
social factorsfactors not always easily identifiable, but
which are critical to processes of a streets re-invention
and sustainability.

Frank Sinatra sang about State Street, that great
street in a paean to Chicago; yet, in the closing decades
of the 20th century, State Street was a boulevard on
life support. Located in the citys commercial centre,
planners tenaciously sought to revive the once majestic
thoroughfare. First, it was turned into a pedestrian
zone, and then revamped and returned to the clamour
of autos and buses traversing downtown. Despite
its architectural landmarks, after six oclock State Street
Notes on a Street in Transition
Allan Siegel
was drained of its vitality, as people returned to

surrounding neighbourhoods and the suburbs.

Undertakings like State Street, regardless of the
collection of experts, are ineffective if the motives
at the base of the process are ill-conceived or fail to
consider the socio-spatial dynamics that have
propelled a streets evolution (or its demise). With the
locations under consideration here, these issues
come to the fore: in the more general sense as case
studies in the formulation and implementation of
urban design concepts, and more particularly if (and how)
the specific qualities of an urban space can be
amplified and sustained.

Pcs is a small city in southwestern Hungary,
a fraction of the size of Chicago; its historical centre
dates back to the Roman Empire and now contains
an amalgam of nationalities, reflecting the regions geopolitical vicissitudes. The main historical, civic and
religious structures are situated in a core area. Acting as
a buffer against auto traffic, this centre is encircled by
a roadway, which distributes traffic headed into peripheral
areas. Beyond the ring and extending to the citys
boundaries lies an assemblage of smaller communities
and commercial districts. Like windowed monoliths,
the residential areas are dotted with housing blocks.
They give these neighbourhoods a distinct physical
appearance. Expeditiously constructed, frequently prefabricated, this type of mostly featureless housing is seen
often throughout Central/Eastern Europe and was built
in conjunction with regional economic and industrial
policies. Despite the expediency of their construction, these
neighbourhoods frequently contain a range of amenities
and variations in design, sufficient to provide a quite
liveable environment.

Within the midst of this constellation of the old
and new, the banal and the remarkable, lies Kirly Street
(King Street), a street name ubiquitous in Hungary and
often one of significance. In Pcs, it is an important link
in a mostly pedestrian route that runs from one end of the

city ring to the other. A journey along Kirly, including its
western and eastern extensions, is filled with details that
mark the citys history.
79
78
At the streets mid-point is Szchenyi

Square, where the Gzi Kszim
Mosque (now a Catholic Church)
commands this large public space.
Built during the 16th century, when
the city was part of the Ottoman
Empire, it sits perched atop the gently
sloping square. Nearby are the global,
yet here discrete, yellow arches of
a McDonalds and the landmark fourstar Pannonia Hotel. At the eastern
is end of Kirly Street (Upper
Customshouse Street) is what remains of the Zsolnay
ceramics factory. Begun in 1853 as a family enterprise,
it became one of the largest factories in the AustroHungarian Empire; its glazing techniques and
craftsmanship were well-known throughout Europe.
Walking west, and just to the south, are the remnants of
the old market square. A bit further is Theatre Square:
a small public space surrounded by a large concert hall,
theatre and other cultural facilities. On the opposite
side of Szchenyi Square is Jkai Square, a junction
of four streets, the main one being Ferencesek Street,
the pedestrian way linking the city centre to the large
main campus of the University of Pcs, Hungarys largest
university. In this sense, the life blood of Kirly Street
is inseparable from the civic institutions and public spaces
which describe the citys central core.

Thus, as the main element in a well-used urban
pathway, Kirly Street possesses considerable importance
(but with only a passing resemblance to a thriving English
high street). Walking eastward, the contrast becomes
clearer, as the number of vacant storefronts and office
Allan Siegel
spaces increases and Kirlys attractiveness as a business

location becomes marginal. Instead of a well-proportioned
resilience, its allure depends upon the centrally positioned
commercial elements, which in turn rely on tourism and
the drawing power of the theatres, cafs and restaurants
to stay alive.

The thriving English High Street exists on a balance
of commercial enterprises and an available supply of
shoppers. In contrast, while Kirly has an abundance
of potential shoppers, they are drawn mostly to malls
and hypermarkets. What arises then is a sharp disparity
between the historically grounded urban promenade
which Kirly
Street
represents
and the
enclosed
walkways
of the nearby
rkd Shopping Mall. With easy auto access and a location
on the main traffic route bisecting the city, rkd signifies
a prime symbol of the consumerist culture that arose as
East/West barriers were expunged in the years after 1989.
With the ascendancy of malls and hypermarkets, a public
space like the Kirly promenade is pitted against the
enclosed, heavily monitored, privatised space of the mall.

When I arrived in Pcs in October of last year as
part of an artist residency project, the extremities
of the Kirly east-west axis and Szchenyi Square were
part of the massive city-wide transformation easily
seen in the mass of new building construction and
rejuvenation processes. The swirl of activity, traffic detours
and pedestrian re-routings were the result of the citys
designation as a 2010 Cultural Capital of Europealong
with Essen and Istanbul.

Some years ago, when Pcs was vying for the
Cultural Capital title, I attended a planning meeting
which took place in an exhibition space on Kirly Street.
The city was competing against Budapest and other large

Hungarian cities. Besides the short term cash benefits,
many of those present had considered what could be
the long-range positive effects of the citys selection and
made specific suggestions regarding improvements in
the infrastructure and cultural institutions. It was therefore
with great curiosity that I returned to the city and
viewed how the results of those discussions were being
translated. This was not confined just to the city centre:
the stirrings generated by this infusion of public and
private capital could be seen in most areas of the city, but
were highly visibleand disruptivealong the Kirly axis.

During the three months of my residency,
I developed an itinerary of locations which spanned
many of the citys districts. I focused on areas emanating
from Pcs special status. I visited them regularly
and documented aspects of the construction process and
adjustments in many facets of the cityscape. The fact
that many of the changes were cosmetic did not
necessarily diminish their usefulness or value. But some
of this upgrading and new construction was begun rapidly
and often haphazardly. And, while the new buildings
altered the citys fabric and improved its cultural facilities,
the question which often crossed my mind concerned
how all the pieces would fit together and at what cost.

Starting from scratch and creating new structures
represents one type of challenge for architects and
planners, but adjusting, bending or eradicating what
already exists ventures into conceptual and practical
territories where an assortment of conflicting interests
frequently collide, often producing muted solutions devoid
of any cohesion. With such brashness of purpose, the
resulting structures, whether new or refurbished, are
often robbed of historical subtext with the edges of time
brushed into an homogenised surface. The bewildering
sense of purpose which lies behind the Kirly revitalisation
projects seems to relinquish the streets vitality to the
modulated experience of the shopping mall.
77
76
75

Thus, the alteration of Kirly Street illustrates
the shortcomings of cosmetic solutions directed at
fundamental urban issues. Processes of analysis and
evaluation, as well as design, are only conceptual
indicators of how urban transformations can extend
or reconfigure existing social spaces (or accelerate their
disassembly). The outcome of these processes lies
not only in what has been visibly altered, but also in those
structures and spaces that are untouched or vacant.
Thus, today, not far from Kirly
Street, sits a vast empty space that
was formally a small market hall.
Perhaps that market was intrinsic
to its vitality? Now its presence is only
as a gaping wound, despite its
continued inseparability from other
elements within the urban habitat.

Within this framework, a street, with its own
ecological and organic qualities, is simply one element
in the urban matrix. And, while initiatives to alter
these qualities might originate from good intentions,
ultimately, the manner in which urban arteries like
Kirly Street are woven into or disconnected from
the fabric of urban spatiality correlates directly with
the results. And the results cannot be measured simply
by calibrating the number of new faades or walkways.
Rather, the consequences, when they prove to be
beneficial, resonate as a type of magnetic field that crisscrosses a public space, charging it with substance
and meaning.
Pter Rkosi/Tehnica Schweiz
Shop Windows,
an Inventory
74
73
Shop Windows, an Inventory
Pter Rkosi
72
71
Shop Windows, an Inventory
Ders Csaba
70
Community
Community Space
Community and community space are closely related,
this is what we have come to conclude after brainstorming
over the case of Kirly Street (King Street) at the Pcs
workshop of Urban Ideas Bakery.1
1 http://creativecities.
britishcouncil.org/urban_
Shop-windows constitute
the most visible layer
of the urban signscape.
Together with posters,
advertisements and
graffiti messages, they
constantly update the
citys visual environment:
they describe to the
passer-by the current state
of consumable objects.
Created to animate the
desire of shoppers,
they are also talkative
inventories of what a
store has to communicate.
Created with craft, humour
or exhibitionism, some
shop-windows peel
off from the store they
represent and become
self-referential signs, mere
decorations of the street.

While Pter Rkosi
started photographing
shop-windows a few
years ago, his interest in
the subject dates back
to his earlier carrier

as a window-dresser.
Regularly returning to
certain neighbourhoods
or streets, he began
recording and cataloguing
vitrine decorations. The
geometric precision of
these photographs and
their organisation into
a series suggest the
structure of an inventory.
ideas_bakery/event/urban_
ideas_bakery_in_Pcs
A properly functioning community space presupposes a

properly functioning community, which is able to formulate
its claims regarding the space and actively contribute
to its creation and maintenance. Furthermore, this is an
interactive process, during which the community and the
space they occupy evolve hand in hand, while the space
becomes a defining factor of the communitys identity.
In this relationship, the community gradually exceeds the
role of passive consumer of the space, becoming its
manager and developer because they consider it their
own. In this reading, public space development means
not the development of the physical en vironment and not
even that of the community, but the improvement of
their relationship.

Kirly Street, Pcs
The dramatic devaluation of Kirly Street on Pcss public
space market can be traced back to the same system
of relations. Apparently, there are two competing cultures
of cooperation on the market of public space consumers:
on the one hand, traditional public spaces created by the
Cooperation of the civil community and the local government representing it; on the other hand, pseudo-public
spaces engendered by the cooperation of the civil society
and the market.2
69
Community Community Space
2 It is worth making
a distinction between
public spaces founded on
community resources and
culture, serving traditional

civil community functions,
and those founded on
market resources and
culture, serving
economic goals.
It seems that the civil societys and the local governments

culture of co-operation has limited or no capacity for
keeping pace with the consumer/user/manager civil
communitys emerging demands regarding the once
well-established old shopping street. First of all, the
local governments formal culture of development is
ignorant of the communitys claims emerging in relation
to Kirly Street, and is unwilling to involve the actors in
the development process. Secondly, the civil societys
demands or interests are difficult to grasp on account
of their shortcomings.in terms of co-operation and
organisation, and they are unable to assert these as
real partners of the local government. Not only do the
organisational and institutional shortcomings of the
two parties pose a problem, but the cultural conditions
for co-operation are also inadequate.

It also appears that while market mechanisms
are able to mobilise stable financial and organisational
resources for the development and management of
their quasi-public spaces, the informal organisations
of the dissipated community of Pcs provide only a
limited organisational and financial basis for a public
space development process. Moreover, the financial and
organisational base of the local governments formal
organisational culture provides little support in this regard.

As a result, in the case of several actual development
projects, the citizens of Pcs dont consider these
traditional community spaces their own, using them less
and in different ways than conceived by the development
plans, and also devoting less care to their maintenance
and improvement. The structural and organisational
discrepancy that has arisen between the public space
and the public on the levels of use, management and
development reproduces the conflict, which is perceivably
Ders Csaba
68
manifest in the public space. This degrades the competitiveness of Kirly Street, as well as central public
spaces fulfilling traditional community functions in general,
as opposed to quasi-public spaces that employ market
strategies to position themselves much more sensitively
to match the needs of groups of specific social functions.

Bottom-up/top-down views of a conflict
This spatial and communal discrepancy has a number
of interesting and, in terms of finding a solution, important
readings. Each approach endeavours to represent some
kind of concordance of spatial and communal phenomena,
an interpretation that crystallises a proposal for a solution.
Each figure (including the ones above) therefore inevitably
presupposes an innovative visualisation of the information
at hand; not only because of the social, economic and
political tension, as well as the disparity of their spatial
views,3
3 Cf. Bill Hillier (1996)
Space is the machine.
Hilliers model has certain
limitations as regards the

actual mapping of reality;
as Bill Hillier writes: it is
likely that the designers

predictions will refer only
to an illusory reality.
but also owing to the constantly changing point of view

assumed by interpretation and development. In addition
to developing the language of imparting information,
this visualisation process is a means of producing
information/knowledge.

The viewpoints have been examined from two
aspects, comprising two different methodological
approaches. The macro-view involved a fundamentally
deductive way of thinking in exploring the situation of
Kirly Street on the basis of the functional discrepancies
of the prevailing system. The micro-views involved an
inductive approach, regarding the functional discrepancies
of Kirly Street through the point of view of the actors.
Both aspects are indispensable for complete transparency.
On the one hand, because macro-scale models are based
on the cultural regularities of micro-scale phenomena;
67
Community Community Space
Macro Perspective
The Spatio-functional Context
of the Kirly Street
Ders Csaba
66
CommunityCommunity Space
Ders Csaba
on the other hand, because these cultural foundations are

rather plastic in a society under such intense transformation
as Hungary, including Pcs, causing a high probability of
distortion in the case of a macro-approach.
current project: public space developments have been

realised only in connection with key projects, to reinforce
their synergy. The pedestrian shopping street still doesnt
curve towards the Knowledge Centre and the Concert Hall,
and access to the Zsolnay Cultural Quarter still requires
a map and a great deal of perseverance. With the densest
traffic in Pcs, Zsolnay Road bisects rather than connects
the city centre.
65

Macro: Kirly Street in the spatial-functional

system of the texture of the city
Since the political transition in 1989, the public space
market has undergone considerable transformation
as regards Kirly Street. The first significant event in this
transformation was the appearance of the quasi-public
space of the RKD shopping centre in 2004, in the
immediate vicinity of the historic city centre. Exploiting
the advantage and superiority of the commercial
quasi-public space, as well as the weak points of the
shopping street (lack of parking, public transport and
management, seasonality), it forced Pcss once lustrous
but now languid shopping street into a competitive
disadvantage. The coup de grce to the streets commercial
function was the erratic introduction of parking fees and
the lagging public space development projects, ignorant
of the everyday functioning of the city.

A theoretical opportunity for breakout would have
been to interlink the new development zones of the
Capital of Culture (ECC) project, the city centre and the
western campus of the university into a unified spatial
system. The functions of the ECC projects involving the
city centre and the university could be organised into
a synergic system linking and complementing the three
zones by relatively simple means. In this relation, besides
the Martyrs of Arad Road circumventing the historic city
centre to the north and the Zsolnay-Rkczi Streets
to the south, a significant role would be imparted on
Kirly Street, the main east-west axis of the city centre.
This would have come in handy in giving impetus to
the eastern end of Kirly Street, which now gradually dies
away after losing integrity towards Wheat Square.
This, however, has only sporadically been achieved by the
64

Micro: Kirly Street on the mental map

of public space users
This analytical approach has focused on the groups of
actors for whom Kirly Street was of concern, with special
regard to how these individuals saw the situation and
problems of the deteriorating street, as well as its causes.
It explored the services offered by the street to each
of these actors, and what they were missing; also how
and to what extent they exploited the physical and
functional capacities of the street. We hoped that certain
facts and aspects which we considered evident and
which provided the premises of macro-scale statements
would be enriched, confirmed, slightly adjusted, or even
refuted by the viewpoints of the specific players.

In this case, a mental map can do more than
visualise a communitys apprehension of a physical space
and its usage patterns; through the latter, it also indicates
the level of success of the co-operation between the
civils and the local government regarding the Kirly Street
area. Responding consumers mark places of interest
on the map in terms of spatial use and functionality:
the figure accurately indicates the discrepancies of the
aforementioned co-operation.

The maps lead us to conclude that presently Kirly
Street functions as a cul-de-sac rather than a street in
the classical sense. It is difficult to predict today how this
situation will be influenced by the scheduled public space
developments and the new cultural quarter intended as
an eastern expansion of the city centre.
Pter Lowas
62
Alternatives of Active Life

in the City of Pcs
The title European Capital of Culture raises a number
of questions. Namely, how is it possible to avoid the
capital of culture becoming a mere projection surface,
where cultural roles and products are represented in
extraordinary magnitude; to what extent the lifestyle of
the residents is affected; how much room is given for
the community the population that forms the structure
and cohesive force of the city, to participate in the
process; what democratic potentials are invoked by its
presence and possible participation.

Pcs is European Capital of Culture in 2010.
The citys original capital of culture programme was a
grassroots initiative, the local intelligentsia and activists
able to keep track of its development, with most of its
ideas based on their conceptions and claims.

The project would have developed an already
existing civil infrastructure further by involving existing
domestic and international relations while administering
no considerable change to the cityscape. The original
programme was modified considerably in the years
following the conception of the project, shifting its focus:
under the control of the ECC office established in
2006, the alteration of the cityscape has played a much
greater role. By 2010, the city has become one enormous
architectural performance, receiving a stream of
tourists with the spectacle of grandiose constructions.
Beyond the official programmes offered by the city,
the impact of the ECC is also considerable in the selforganised alternative cultural scene, if not devoid of
contradictions. For these organisations and alternative
modes of using public space, which have been present
Alternatives of Active Life in the City of Pcs
Pter Lowas
years before the ECC , change lies in an active and

creative life. While existing independently, the
civils and activists of Pcs, as well as its underground
art and music scene, have fostered ever more diverse
international relations. They organise workshops and
festivals, make attempts at filling the gaps of the
alternative market (cheap bicycle repair shop, youth
hostel, ateliers, involving the underprivileged, independent
radio channels, etc.) with their craftivist approach.
The beneficiaries (as opposed to consumers) of these
events and cultural products are primarily young people,
and anyone who is receptive. The feasibility of the
system is guaranteed by the unlimited human resources
(university students, creative intellectuals, etc.), its
complete freedom from politics, and its open structure.
This grassroots activity does not concentrate exclusively
on the city centre: rewriting the cultural topography
of the city, it temporarily resorts to unused spaces on
the peripheries, giving rise to the emergent city through
micro-festivals and communal workshops involving
residents; a city where the intermingling of various
subcultures has a mutually catalysing force.

According to the citys capital of culture concept,
the propelling force of development is infrastructure,
real estate and city image; the civils, in contrast, see this
in communities, groups and individuals, based on the
idea that the a city is essentially defined by its residents.
Decentralised and utterly non-bureaucratic practices can
rapidly adapt to new circumstances and can be revived
in different locations and contexts. On the following pages,
I will discuss these cultural practices and civil initiatives.

Approach Art Association is a group of art
professionals whose focus is organising exhibitions of
contemporary art mainly outside conventional exhibition
spaces: in industrial compounds (Zsolnay Porcelain
Works), temporarily closed cinemas (Apollo Cinema),
the TV Tower on Mecsek Hill, as well as sensitive areas
in the city. Their 2009 series of programmes, Temporary
Citys basic idea was provided by the vacant shops on

Kirly Street (King Street), which were transformed into
exhibition spaces for two weeks, occupied by various
international artists and projects. The placement of art in
spaces out of the ordinary (museum, gallery), together
with the street performances, brought the abstract and
alienated notion of art closer to the people, encouraging
them to interact. Programmes of institutional culture
are rarely capable of this, since they either delegate the
manifestations of art into the sphere of leisure, or fail
to carry any meaning for those outside a narrow elite.
The projects of Approach Art Association resort to the
methods of public or urban art to effectively confront
the citizens with the meaning of art and contemporary
culture today. The Temporary City action, however,
also raised urbanistic issues in addition to artistic ones:
how is it possible that the main street of a city (capital
of culture, in fact) hosts a number of vacant shops,
while its cultural players are constantly looking for
places to occupy, and exist in constant fear of losing
their headquarters, sites, galleries? Drawing on the
opportunities opened up by real estate that had freed
up owing to the economic crisis and had thus become
accessible, the projects of Approach, exploiting their
capacity for the innovative and spontaneous use of space,
laid the foundations of an alternative urban policy.

The objective of Market Platform, yet another
initiative, was to highlight the significance of the
last marketplace in the city centre. The organisers
asked sociologists and artists to reflect on the situation.
The common end brought different social groups
together: the merchants themselves, whose sole remaining
option to defend their position was an artistic scenario
(cf. direct democracy), took part in a number of projects
until the market was shut down for good.

Cult Street (Franciscan Street) was brought to life
through a collaboration of shopkeepers and citizens.
With music and exhibitions, the shopkeepers created
61
60
59
Alternatives of Active Life in the City of Pcs
a sort of street parade atmosphere, from which their sales

also benefit. The event is quite popular, as consumers like
to be entertained while spending their money, listening to
live music while buying books. We also have to devote
a word to the Culture Lab Cooperative, which was created
by civil organisations around the city as an organisation
for the protection of their interests. The group maintained
an experimental cultural space on the border of city centre
and periphery for two years, accommodating, among
others, non-popular genres of music and art. Having lost
the industrial building that housed these experiments
(as it was taken over by the citys ECC project), Culture
Lab now rents several spaces on Kirly Street, which they
renovate from grants funding, as well as their own means.
One of these spaces is their headquarters, with offices,
sleeping quarters, a kitchen and ateliers; another one is
an alternative bicycle repair shop (Velosophie bike kitchen),
and they also plan to start a youth hostel. The Labs
significance in the citys culture is essential: they have
organised several street festivals and programmes
involving residents, focusing their events on the goal of
calling attention to the opportunities that lie in the unused
spaces around the city. This kind of soft urbanism, the
rehabilitation of public space and unused real estate
via communal use, is a realistic alternative to mega
investments that are themselves destined to fail without
the support of the citizens and in want of a programme
that is in harmony with the architectural designs.

The Labs latest programme took place in a long
abandoned mine-shaft. Krtakr Mayfest could be
realised because the renowned theatre director rpd
Schilling, also participating in the programme, created
a performance based on the programme proposals
submitted by the civils of Pcs in the early stages
of the project. In the course of a long and intense
cooperation, Krtakr (theatre company Chalk Circle)
and the Lab put together an event from these that
would involve different local social groups, as well as
Pter Lowas
58
student age groups. Meanwhile, the spectators were also

offered the opportunity to participate, and the entire event,
in terms of infrastructure and logistics, relied on creative
civil groups.

With Collegium Utopium, Krtakr appeared in
the city more as a catalyst than a theatre group, fostering
local initiatives. Despite its financial fragility and unpredictability, there are a number of lessons inherent in
this logic: exploiting the potentials of the city, building
on existing capacities and needs could be informative
for larger institutions and programmes, which are often
unable to represent subcultures, the visibility and
active representation of which is essential to democratic
urban culture.
Emoke
Kerekes & Anna Mzes
Vendors portraits,
Kirly Street, Budapest
56
55
Vendors portraits, Kirly street
Bla Kli
54
Culs-de-sac of Transformation:
The fate of historic
neighbourhoods after
privatisation
While surveys generally

focus on the residents
of a particular area, we
often have no information
about the people who
work there. However,
these are the people
who affect the character
of a neighbourhood the
most. Emoke
Kerekes
and Anna Mzes, in their
series of portraits taken
of shopkeepers in Kirly
Street, reveal the great
variety of retail types
in the neighbourhood
and the heterogeneity
of their vendors. This
heterogeneity suggests
a variety of shoppers
who frequent the street:
they are all, from another
viewpoint, agents of
various uses of the city,
and consequently, offer
contrasting visions for the
street. In these images,
each vendor or employee
appears in a frontal
perspective, usually gazing
into the photographers

lens; the grocery, textile
outlet, hardware store,
boutique, vegetable stall,
carpet shop, pharmacy,
hairdresser, restaurant,
bar, design store, art
gallery, flower shop,
and confectionary are
revealed behind them
as an accumulation of
the paraphernalia of a
profession.
The inner Erzsbetvros (Elizabethtown) in Budapest fell

victim to the merchant spirit already upon its formation in
the late 19th century. A rather dense urban structure was
formed already then with all lots covered from one end
to the other leaving very little public space. With the
exception of Klauzl Square, there are no green areas or
parks in the inner, densely populated quarters of Districts
VI and VII. Although such spaces were, in fact, included
in the urban planning, the city sold them to investors, and
they have been built over. These strongly profit-oriented
developments of the late 19th century are usually referred
to as the first large-scale real estate speculations.
The unprecedented growth at the time provided a fertile
ground for these in all respects.

It was after the joining of previously separate districts
in 1873 that Budapest became a capital lacking the
necessary basic institutions and public facilities, as most
of these had been operating in Vienna and Bratislava.
Parliament, public administration, universities, schools,
hospitals all of these had to be built from scratch, as
well as the residential buildings that would accommodate
the masses working to build a metropolitan capital from the
medium-size city of a population of 100,000. It was a selfgenerating process, as it coincided with the dawn of
industrialisation in Hungary. Industrial development, and
the concentration of labour force it required, had made the
building of new neighbourhoods necessary, which itself
Culs-de-sac of Transformation
Bla Kli
provided hundreds of thousands with work for decades

to come.

Most of the buildings erected in this period are still
standing, except for those that have fallen victim to World
War II and recent real estate speculations. Of course, they
have been run down by sixty years of negligence and an
almost complete lack of maintenance, but they will still
stand for longer than the architectural products of the past
20 or 30 years. This is mainly due to the favourable
conditions at the time of their construction: the high quality
of materials, the professional expertise, and the handicraft
traditions. These buildings were state of the art in their
age, and were designed with considerable reserves
structurally and statically. Their load-bearing walls were
made from high-quality fired bricks true, initially mixed
with carved limestone, which has less load-bearing
capacity. If these structures have not been weakened
by later in-expert reconstructions and renovations,
they can serve as a good basis for a perhaps even citywide real estate development project.

The residential houses comprising more than
100,000 flats in Budapest have essential social significance,
as well: they were designed by an architectural programme that allowed the mingling of different social
groups. The street front housed large flats with a street
view, inhabited by wealthy or bourgeois families.
The small flats in the side and back tracts lacked facilities
and opened onto the courtyard. This is where the less
wealthy, the poor, and the workers lived. Ground-floor
shops along the main routes such as Kirly Street
were occupied by merchants; the ones in the courtyards
by artisans. Certain blocks housed bigger manufactories
where industrial production took place. The tenement
model comprised a diverse palette of interdependent
social strata, groups and professions, encompassing
entire quarters.

All this changed with one stroke when all private
property was nationalised in 1952. This not only meant
the disappearance of the bourgeoisie: wealthy families

were deported, their valuables seized, their flats divided
into smaller ones to satisfy the renewed housing demand.
The post-war political elite discontinued the previous
regimes practice of investing capital into erecting new
houses and entire quarters for the labour force swarming
to Budapest from the provinces as a result of centralisation.
They solved the problem with their own simple and fast
means, breaking up most of the existing flats. At the
same time, merchant streets, shops, boutiques and
manufactories disappeared. It took decades for the city
to recover and to rediscover its urban scene and spaces,
but by that time, the construction of housing projects had
started, as yet another contribution to de-urbanisation.

The regimes pool of devices was not exhausted by
eliminating the fundament of downtown life the
bourgeoisie. Since the nationalised houses had started
to wear down for want of maintenance, the political
leadership resettled already poor Romany families into
parts of the city centre thus left to erode Districts VI,
VII, VIII and IX. This decision is a perfect example of the
ruling powers cynicism: neither the Romany, nor the
deteriorating buildings benefited from the resettlement.
The task of preserving the physical condition of the
central districts remained unaccomplished.

As of the 1990s, everything was reassessed once
more amidst the sudden emergence of the market.
Previously national properties were passed on to the local
governments, each of which could decide freely on their
fate. The majority of real estate was sold by the districts
to their residents. In view of the comparative statistical
analysis, it appears as though the Hungarian families had
all at once turned wealthy overnight: the private property
per capita is now a lot higher than in most other European
countries. In fact, the assets were simply reorganised:
the country did not gain wealth.

The fact that the tenants had become owners
did little to improve the physical condition of the flats,
53
52
Bla Kli
and so the quality of life remained practically the same.

Although the privatisation of flats comprised hundreds of
thousands of transactions and produced income for the
local governments, these authorities failed to use these
returns to create new funds or reinvest them into the real
estate to increase their value and raise the standards of
the districts. Tenant-turned-owners acquired their freehold
flats at a bargain price, often as little as 10% of the market
value, although there was no stable real estate market at
this time, so the prices were hypothetical. In this manner,
almost anyone could turn into a flat owner without having
to comply with the financial requirements of being one.

Real estate is an asset, and practically the most
valuable one at that. As any asset, it needs to be managed,
and requires knowledge of the obligations and expenses
this entails. Asset management is a professional field
that requires circumspection, know-how, and even risk
assessment. Real estate is at once a capital and an
investment, with a corresponding yield.

The majority of real-estate owners in Hungary lack
the knowledge that the appropriate management of
their property would require. The right of the current stock
of flats especially old residential houses to exist is
constantly questioned because no one is willing to do their
maintenance. The majority of inhabitants have become
owners by a one-time effort, but their lifestyle as owners is
existentially unsustainable. The money once invested into
the flat remains dead capital, whose capacity of producing
income remains dormant for want of allocating resources
to maintenance, renovation and development. This capital
is simply worn down by the inhabitants, while renting a
flat would perhaps provide a better quality of life for them.

Today it seems that the privatisation of the local
governments stock of flats has not solved anything: 10 or
15 years after the transactions, there is still no considerable
improvement in the liveability of these districts. The
bestexample is the inner Erzsbetvros the old Jewish
Quarter of Pest which is still characterised by run-down
buildings and the lack of public spaces. Among

the sagging buildings, however, private capital has
popped its head out, erecting characteristically
characterless buildings to replace the demolished
old residential houses.

Nowadays, urban planning for the area allows
practically everything necessary for making a quick profit,
which is exhaustively exploited by the investors.
The magic phrases or numbers are lot coverage
limitation and floor-area ratio, which, in the case of
these districts, allow a coverage that is even denser than
the already extremely close-knit texture of the city.
With the continued reduction of flat sizes, there are even
more residents per lot, resulting in a deteriorating
quality of life. This new investors behaviour, assisted by
the local governments, further degrades the conditions
of life of the area, even if the street fronts are no longer
run down. The quality and architectural appearance of
the newly erected buildings with a few exceptions is
completely sleazy and disgraceful.

The question emerges: what, then, is urban planning
good for? Theoretically it serves to design medium and
long-term interventions in service of a future objective, and
to control the profit-oriented operations of investors, all
in favour of the public and future liveability. Obviously, the
investor who, by the way, pockets a multiple of the profit
that is realisable by fair means on the Western European
market, and with much less risk and meagre performance
will not give a lot of thought to architectural quality.
The economic crisis has only slowed this process down
temporarily: investors, as well as banks, are ready to jump,
waiting for the critical period to wear out so that they
can resume real estate development, because this is the
most profitable business in the region.

Despite their run-down condition, the buildings in
Budapest are suitable for designing up-to-date living
spaces: in addition to their static features mentioned
above, their spaces also vouch for this. The existing
51
50
49
real-estate assets cannot be efficiently and sustainably

made use of without the active participation of local
governments. Of course, there have been attempts at
rehabilitation before, as well as after the political
transformation. However, the rehabilitation of entire
blocks, which began in the 1980s in the inner Erzsbetvros,
proved to be unsuccessful: not only was the construction
industry incapable of producing high quality, but its
fundamental concepts were also dubious the zones
of these buildings that were designated as public
space have been vacant for decades.

State-of-the-art renovation of old buildings is never
an easy task, but feasible, even if with more modest return
rates than todays investment practice. It is also possible
to modify and modernise these spaces: within a block
it is possible to open several courtyards together, make
passageways, and design diverse spaces and programme
facilities, with high quality contemporary interventions.
The development of public spaces and green areas
combined with a cutback in traffic is also an integral
part of renewing the central districts. Naturally, this can
only be realised as part of a rehabilitation practice in
which buildings are designed in accordance with public
spaces, public functions and services.
Graphics by Tmea Csaba and Gergely Kovcs
48
Mapping Internal
Borders
If statistics can provide

evidence of tendencies
taking place in larger
areas, it also risks to
obscure difference at the
level of phenomenological
experience. In our ongoing

mapping inquiry, we
propose to combine these
two epistemological levels:
systematic interpretation
of information based on
primary perception are

developed into maps;
maps are used as tools to
make visible the internal
borders of Kirly street.
47
Even numbers side, Kirly Street, Budapest
Kirly Street, Budapest
22
1214
1620
40
2830
3438
5254
4450
52
6062
46
45
Mapping Internal Borders
44
66
43
42
41
Odd numbers side, Kirly Street, Budapest
1.a
1.a1.e
1315
1719
25
3137
4143
4749
1921
6466
40
Lszl Munten
39
5359
59.b
38
The Street as Palimpsest:

The Dialectics of
Preservation and Demolition in
Budapests Kirly Street
Over the course of the past decade, the area of District
VII, known as Budapests old Jewish quarter, has been
a scene of fierce battles between developers supported
by a largely corrupt district government and those civic
organisations that have been assiduous in their attempt
to protect the districts 19th century building stock, a large
part of which has already fallen victim to the wrecking ball.
The present architectural landscape of the district offers
a unique palimpsest encompassing multiple layers of
the districts history, from low-rise Neo-Classicist houses
erected in the first half of the 19th century to recently
completed multi-storey apartment blocks sporting vivid
colours and large balconies with a Mediterranean touch.
The mouth of Kirly street (King Street) at Kroly krt all
the way up to Kazinczy street showcases ample examples
of such new apartment complexes standing in stark con
trast to their older neighbours. At the core of the upsurge
of public resentment against these new developments
stands the notion of preservation of the districts pre-World
War II architectural heritage perceived as a token of identity.
By contrast, most of the demolition and the new construc
tions have been vindicated by the district government as
part of the areas overall rehabilitation. If rehabilitation is
used as a euphemism for the destruction of the districts
organically developed architectural heritage, the concept
of heritage seems equally vague when it comes to the
actual identity that it allegedly signifies.

What constitutes this heritage then? Unlike in other
The Street as Palimpsest
Lszl Munten
European cities, where Jews had built districts for them

selves in the Middle Ages, here they moved into an existing
texture of late-Baroque and Neo-Classicist houses after
having been granted the right to settle down in the second
half of the 1780s. It was not until later in the 19th and early
20th century that rare architectural features such as
through houses providing passageways and interconnected
courtyards between parallel streets were built (as in the
case of the Gozsdu court between Kirly street and Dob
street), as well as buildings combining residential and
industrial functions, forming a maze of alleyways lending
a peculiar ambiance to the quarters streets. Ever since the
early 1800s, Kirly street functioned as the single artery
connecting the inner city with City Park. Although with the
construction of Andrssy Boulevard in the 1870s, the street
was slightly alleviated from its heavy traffic, it still continued
to serve as an interface between Terzvros (Theresatown)
and the younger Erzsbetvros (Elizabethtown), forming
the northern border of the Jewish district. Heritage value
is not so much manifested in architecturally outstanding
buildings, with the exception of a few designed by promi
nent architects, as in the peculiar streetscapes and layouts
that speak to a bygone era of a vibrant community of
merchants and craftsmen. But in spite of the international
protection granted to the Jewish quarter by UNESCO in
2002 as a buffer zone alongside the world-heritage
Andrssy Boulevard, its protected status could not keep
corruption at bay. The decimation of its 19th century
housing stock accelerated in the subsequent years, until
the National Office of Cultural Heritage, forced by public
pressure, declared it an area of monumental historic
significance in 2005 and extended official protection to
51 buildings.

Significantly, few (if any) of the activists dedicated
to the protecting of the old buildings are residents in the
area. Other local forms of public involvement within the
district have emerged but seem to be in embryonic stages.
Conversely, however, the ambiance of the past afforded
by the remaining old buildings has elicited multiple forms

of nostalgia. The wide popularity of courtyard bars set up
in abandoned interiors amid peeling plaster subscribes
to such a nostalgic desire to connect with an imagined
past through an environment pleasing in its evanescence.
A complete opposite of the practice of faadism, in which
the faade of a building is preserved and new interiors are
designed behind it (as in 12 Holl Street), ruinous courtyard
bars feed on the uncanny combination of the archaeologi
cal gaze and a carnivalistic pleasure of ruinsafforded by
the precarious state of such buildings.

The peculiar ambiance that such places emanate
derives from the surviving elements of the disorderly,
maze-like arrangement of passageways that urban plan
ners have sought to replace with a transparent pattern
ever since the early 20th century. The planning of a new
boulevard (Erzsbet Boulevard) that would have connec
ted the inner ring with the outer ring dates back to 1908,
but its realisation was thwarted by World War I. The idea
would reemerge in 1929, and eight years later, the
socalled Madch Houses were built with a monumental
arch connecting the two massive slabs of apartment
blocks. Ironically, World War II withheld further construc
tion of the boulevard into the Jewish quarter, leaving the
grandiose structure as a monument to an ill-fated project.
Although anachronistic in its inception, the idea emerged
once again in the 1950s, even if with the plan for the
boulevard reduced to a promenade. And even if a 12-storey
office tower (built in the early 1990s) blocks the way behind
the grand arch of the Madch Houses, the idea for the
promenade still persists as a formative element defining
prospective plans for the area. In its present form, the
promenade cuts through the renovated courtyards of
Gozsdu Court and continues all the way to Kazinczy street,
defined by the overwhelmingly Mediterranean look of the
recently completed apartment blocks. Here, the promenade
is blocked by two old buildings in deplorable condition.
The one on the left (47 Kazinczy street) features a plaque,
37
36
The Street as Palimpsest
Gab Bartha
attached to the bare brick where the plaster had fallen

off, declaring the house a protected monumentwith its
residents long ago evicted, just like in the neighbouring
no. 49.

Although not in the form of a monumental boulevard
rimmed by modernist streetscapes as envisioned in the
1930s, the legacy of this project remains to be a haunting
presence that exerts its influence on the blocks between
Kirly street and Dob street in the form of demolition,
faadism and, most prominently, new apartment blocks
that rise above their older neighbours as harbingers of
the quarters further gentrification. The uncanny sight of the
decrepit, abandoned Neo-Classicist house with a plaque
at its gate facing the grand balconies of the multi-storey
residential block that could be anywhere in the world not
only encompasses the radical confrontation of old and new,
but places the possibility of communication between them
at stake. For within the mechanism of the power relations
that crystallised in the wake of demolitions, the production
of heritage, as well as the historic character that it pur
portedly represents, takes shape as a desperate reaction
to the imminent danger of its destruction. Instead of
forming an and-and relation, old and new are pitted against
each other in an either-or binary.
Re-thinking the Marketplace:

A story of
resistance and proactivity
35
34
In 2007, a cluster of activists formed the group Our Treasure,

the MarketHunyadi Square (KAP-HT) in order to save
the market at Hunyadi Square, which is the only remaining
open-air food market in the central districts of Budapest.
Linking the luxurious Andrssy Avenue to the Kirly Street
(King Street) area that is undergoing radical transformations,
this market has become an indicator of the changing demo
graphics, value systems and consumption patterns of the
city. For years, the KAP-HT (together with ecologist group
Vdegylet) has been working on raising public awareness
of the disappearing open-air markets, by emphasising the
social and logistic importance of meeting places and sources
of affordable, healthy food.
In recent years, various debates have surrounded the

market on Hunyadi Square. First, and most notoriously, with
respect to plans for an underground garage beneath the
original site of the open-air market and park, a plan ignoring
environmental impact studies and lacking any downtown
traffic planning. After long negotiations and interventions
of the KAP-HT group, the local government took into
account the importance of involving local residents in the
decision-making process. Meanwhile, they also decided
Re-thinking the Marketplace
Gab Bartha
to apply for EU funds together for the renovation of the

site. Various participatory exercises were introduced to
collect views and opinions of the planned development,
while the impact of the community on the final plans still
remained strongly compromised. The proposed plan for
the market square envisioned a 500-car parking garage
under the square, which went against the agreement of
the participating residents.

Following an unsuccessful bid to raise EU funding
for the planned car park, the local government shifted its
focus to smaller interventions like renovating the park,
creating a new playground, re-designing the market stalls
and turning parts of the square into a moderated traffic
zone, thus allowing for more space for the Friday and
Saturday markets.

Nevertheless, the conflict was renewed by the local
governments plans to clear from the square a significant
number of trees, considered as unsafe and endangering
public use of the square. KAP-HTs call for independent
expertise contributed to deepening the disagreement
between supporters of the competing plans. Trees became
thus crucial in the districts heritage preservation strategy:
once the trees are removed, plans for the parking garage
may gain momentum, and the existence of the farmers
market may be put into question. Close cooperation with
the districts chief architect did not prevent the market
from remaining on precarious ground: municipal attempts
to reduce its hours of activity and to increase the stall
rental fee may result in a more exclusive market structure.

To improve the markets visibility and strengthen the
sense of community that the market catalysed, KAP-HT
has organised numerous events at the market square and
at other locations. KAP-HTs activity is not limited to cam
paigning: activists of the group got involved in the life of
the market, elaborating strategies for improving services
and product variety (by introducing new herbs and vege
tables, extending the selection of goods and foods) as
well as opening up alternative channels of communication
between the market traders, the wider public, visitors and

customers of the market and the local authorities. The most
recent events included a thematic exhibition organised
around the notion of the market, food infrastructure and
related issues in the downtown life of Budapest, aiming
to involve and reach the non-market-going crowd.
33
32
Based on my 15 years experience as a visitor of this

marketwhich includes three years of active involvement
in the life of Hunyadi Square, as an initiator of the grassroots
movement to save the farmers marketI met, made
friendships and collaborated with traders and other visitors,
enabling me to describe the market through the different
profiles of the various traders. These are the following:
1 Pensioner, never having been a farmer; living
in Budapest, with an allotment garden, selling
surplus harvest;
2 Pensioner, living in Budapest, regularly
selling vegetables from the garden attached
to the house;
3 Elderly farmers, giving up selling, who may be
replaced by a family member;
4 Vendors selling products from mid-scale
farmers and from wholesale markets;
5 Pensioner, living in a small town, and growing
a small quantity of vegetables to complement
his/her pension. (People aged over 65 ride the
trains for free, and bringing a few kilograms
of produce to the market is a good opportunity
for them to earn some money);
6 Mid-scale farmer with family traditions (often
their parents and grandparents were also
31
farmers and went to the market with a cart in

the past), coming to the market by car;
7 Farmer with family traditions, selling his/her
own vegetables and fruits, complemented with
products from the wholesale market;
8 Farmer with family traditions, subsistence
farmer, bringing only a smaller ammount of
fruits and vegetables to the market by train;
9 Relatively young villager, having lost his
factory job due to the economic transition
following the end of Communism, coming
to the market by train, bringing what s/he
can carry;
10 Has been working in agriculture/silviculture,
but was not a small producer; still does
seasonal work for others occasionally, brings
produce in a small rucksack and comes
by train;
11 Village pensioner after civilian job; amateur
gardener, bringing jams, flowers, fruits
in season;
12 Villager with very low pension-grabs what s/he
can from her garden;
13 Villager coming only with some seasonal
products only at certain times of the year;
14 Retired technical intellectual, living in a village,
having always cultivated a small garden, and
swearing to quit every year after finding a more
profitable activity;
Gab Bartha
30
15 Relatively young vendor, selling his/her own

product, complemented with a wide range of
products from the wholesale market;
16 Traditionally a florist, selling merchandise from
the wholesale flower market;
17 Vendor selling attractive goods from the
wholesale market.
Selling at the open-air farmers market requires a primary
producers certificate, but people who own a small piece
of land can easily obtain this. Primary producers have
the advantage of not having to pay taxes on transactions
worth under HUF 640,000 (ca. 1870 GBP) annually, which
is a good enough reason for retailers to pretend about their
status both to authorities and their customers. Producers
with long family traditions of selling their produce have
witnessed the gradual dwindling of the market area on
Hunyadi Square: today only one side of the square has
stalls, and business has declined since the arrival of hyperand supermarkets to Hungary in the 1990s. Others see
the market as an opportunity to complement their income
while still retaining another job. Another group of vendors
turned to small-scale farming after losing their jobs as a
result of the collapse of the Communist economic system
and closure of factories.

Elderly people sell food at markets to complement
their small pension, as over the age of 65, they can use
public transportation free of charge, so that their only
expense is the stall rental fee. Keeping the stall rental fee
Gab Bartha
relatively low is essential to maintain this group in the

market. However, they can hardly compete with larger
producers: the more stalls they have, and the wider range
of products, the better they position themselves on the
market. The issue of food diversity and inclusive economy
is yet to be raised by customers. Ideally, if market vendors
formed an organisation, they would be more efficient in
defending their interests vis--vis the local government.
However, if their unity is impossible to achieve, there are
many reasons for that: conflicting interests between primary
producers and re-sellers, a lack of self-confidence and of
a culture of self-organising are the most important among
these factors.
The sellers of the

Hunyadi Square Market,
Budapest
29

And who are the shoppers?
Local pensioners, housewives and various people working
in the neighbourhood. For locals who have free time
during the day on weekdays, it is probably a habit to go
to the market. Chefs from nearby restaurants also come
for a quick hunt for herbs or fresh fruit and vegetables that
were harvested on the previous, or the very same day.
People on a tight budget appreciate the
possibility to bargain at the outside
market, or to have the option to choose
something cheaper, while other
health-conscious consumers come
here to buy food that is locally produ
ced. The fight of the local citizens
group to save the open-air market has attracted attention
to the spot, with the market listed as the second best
market in Hungary, causing a small but steady increase
in the number of visitors from younger generations.
28
27
The Sellers of the Hunyadi Square Market
. Albert, B. Dvid, R. Schutzmann & Cs. Zs. Vizi
26
On the Trace of the Ring:

globalisation and real estate
on the most emblematic
(Buda)Pest street
Gab is a visitor of the
Hunyadi Square Market
and has three years of
active involvement as an
initiator of the grassroots
movement to save the
farmers market. She met,
made friendships and

collaborated with traders
and other visitors,
enabling her to describe
the market through the
different profiles of the
various traders.
Budapest, the capital of Hungary, boasts a number of

invaluable national monuments. Many of these are
residential houses still owned by the local governments.
Recent years have witnessed the demolition and elimi
nation of these buildings with no regard for their national
monument status. This is especially true of Budapests
District VII, Erzsbetvros (Elizabethtown, the old Jewish
ghetto). This is where the three buildings of our concern,
Kirly Street 252729, are located. Using social network
analysis, we have researched and charted the history of
their privatisation since the political transition.
Buildings no. 252729 on Kirly Street are in poor
condition. Years ago, it seemed that the local government
could ameliorate the situation by selling them. They did
so, but the exchange was conducted in a highly irregular
manner. The goal of our research has been to unveil the
process and background of this exchange. Over the course
of time, several new players entered the field, making
the story increasingly difficult to untangle, especially for
the outsider. This called for a methodology that would
render this exchange process visible, so as to make order
in the mesh of names and firms that seemed unrelated at
first glance.

Our small world is held together by the force of
relationships. We ourselves are the individual points who
strive to find our way day by day in this unfathomable
and complex world sustained by the links of relationships.
25
On the Trace of the Ring
Our orientation and awareness are often hindered by our

failure to recognise how interdependent we are. Often,
with more or less success, we try to form a mental picture
of a space where we can position ourselves and those
surrounding us. Reality, however, is much too complex
and unfathomable for us to comprehend it outside our
immediate environment.

In the past yearspartly to satisfy this desirethe
network approach has gained ever greater popularity.
This school is specialised in studying the network of
relationships: harmonising qualitative and quantitative
methods, its subject of observation is the relationship
itself: among individuals, groups, or even institutions.
One of the most intriguing trends in social network
analysisadopting the work of, among others, Mark
Lombardiis the visualisation of the network of
relationships. Its goal is to make reality known in its
very complexity and impenetrability.

While Mark Lombardi ventured to graph all this
manually, today there are a number of software appli
cations at the disposal of researchers. Reality is now
displayable with these, after building an appropriate
database and running specific algorithms.
The database necessary for exposing the case of real
estate manipulation on Kirly Street was based on the
systematic research of aconsiderablenumber of
press publications regarding the issue. We mapped the
data in a two-mode social network matrix, in which we
linked individuals relevant to the story with the firms they
were connected with on the basis of the press material.
The data collection encompassed every article (26 in all)
published on the topic between 2004 and 2009, and
included the complaint submitted to the court against
the local government. Upon completion, the two-mode
database was analysed using the MDS (multidimensional
scaling) option in NetDraw. In the social network thus
graphed, individuals and firms with similar relationship
24
indexes are juxtaposed, while players filling very different

functions are distant to one another.
The following 14 stages are required for such a complex
and non-transparent social network to develop:
Stages 114: the route to obtain real estate
on Kirly Street
1 The local government commissions its own
firm to carry out the appraisal of the buildings.
The assessed price is generally equivalent to
the cost of relocating the residents.
2 Following the appraisal, a project firm,
established by private individuals with the
specific purpose of purchasing the residential
house in question, approaches the local
government to make an offer for the building.
3 The president of the local governments
economic committee (EC) submits a proposal
to the local governments Board of Represen
tatives (BR) regarding the sale of the building.
The proposal includes the name of the buyer
and the purchase price (a fictive price that will
never be paid to the local government).
4 The BR meeting is chaired by the District
Mayor. The sale of the residential houses
is decided at a closed session. The E C
proposal is distributed at the meeting,
and the BR passes the proposal; in other
words, accedes to selling the building.
At the conclusion of the board meeting, the
proposal is collected from the board members.
After the vote, all documents regarding the
real estate sale are held exclusively by the
23
president of the Economic Committee and the

District Mayor.
5 Residential houses in which BR members or
MPs hold apartments are not subject to sale.
6 The residential houses are sold without a
public tender, violating public procurement law.
7 Owners of the firms established for purchasing
purchasing the residential houses come from
the same circle and are personally related to
the local government. The newly established
firm is well informed, and this is how, months
before the official decision to sell the real
estate is issued by the Board, they begin
negotiations with foreign investors.
8 Based on a contract of sale with the local
government, the buyer firms acquire a 3-year
right of purchase on the residential house,
with the local governments retained ownership.
9 The buyer firms headquarters and the
law firms involved are registered at identical
addresses. Two law firms have had an
instrumental role in the sales, accommodating
the firms established solely for the purpose
of purchasing and re-selling the buildings.
10 Subsequently, the buyer firmwithout having
paid a penny to the local governmentbegins
to pass on its right of purchase by selling
shares in the firm. The firm itself is sold at
an extremely low price (810,000 euros),
including the rights of purchase in its property.
11 The tenants living in the residential houses

are completely oblivious to the above
proceedings. They receive no information
whatsoever about the roof being sold from
over their heads. The representative of the
investor calls on the tenants, showing them
documents of authorisation from the firm
and the local government, informing them
that they need to vacate their flats.
12 In most cases, the tenants protest against
the sale of their building, and claim their
right of pre-emption regarding their apartment,
which is denied by the local government.
13 Once the project firm finds a serious buyer,
its ownership is passed on to offshore firms
in Cyprus, the Seychelles or Ireland (without
any transfer of money), who pass on the right
of purchase to mainly Irish investors. The pur
chase price paid by the investors is a multiple
many times over the value originally appraised
by the local government; thus, the owners of
the project firms acquire enormous profit.
14 Eventually, the local government ends up
selling the property for as much as it cost
to relocate the tenants, thus relinquishing
ownership of the building, while being left
with virtually zero return on the sale. Meanwhile,
the project firms acquire an abundant profit
despite selling the buildings below market
value. The outcome: ownership of the buildings
is passed into foreign hands, and a part of
this world heritage is destroyed to give place
to modern, featureless buildings.
22
21
Presently, the above case is before the court, and

numerous politicians and businessmen have been
arrested. Investigation is underway in the case of
14 buildings in all.

We hope that social network visualisation has
helped us render the story of the sale of Kirly Street
2529 visible and more comprehensible even for
those personally not involved. We believe this clarity
of vision provides important and useful knowledge
for all.
dm Albert
20
Hunt the Key:

(Buda)Pest street
Running on the borders
of the 6th and 7th district
of Budapest, Kirly Street
was famously called in
the past century the most
emblematic (Buda)Pest
street by the writer Gyula
Krdy. The neoclassical
buildings on Kirly
Streetsome of them
belonging to the national heritage listnow all await
renovation or demolition. Amongst others, 2529 Kirly
Street, three nationally protected buildings adjacent
to each other are for sale.

This visualisation is based on 27 newspaper articles
published since 2004 in 12 different papers, written by
journalists committed to meticulous research on some
of these processes and manipulations of the increasing
globalisation of Kirly Street. Analysis of the relationship
of different companies, firms and people who were in
volved in one way or another in the procedure of selling
these real-estate reveal a vastly complex network. The
visualisation displays peoples and companies affiliations
differently, aiming to reveal a particular kind of power,
decoding a convoluted, not at all transparent process which
has been applied in other 13 cases in the past 6 years
along Kirly Street in Budapest.
19
Hunt the key:

(Buda)Pest street
Hunt the Key
dm Albert
18
17
Temporarily Inhabited Space
Mikls Surnyi
Temporarily
Inhabited Space
16
15
Temporarily Inhabited Space
95
A
p
p
e
n
d
With the ups and downs
of the real-estate market,
the balance between
supply and demand of
residential, office and retail
spaces often becomes
unsettled. The apartments
turned into offices in
boom times, and shops
developed into dwellings
in times of shortage are
all signs of this disequilibrium. Kirly Street
and its surroundings,
accommodating various
frontlines between con

trasting visions of the
city, has long functioned
as the most important
terrain to test the possi
bilities to use spaces
differently from the pur
poses for which they were
originally built.

Deserted residential
buildings, abandoned
garages and warehouses,
disused schools and
community edifices have
become fertile ground for
cultural experimentation.
In his series, Mikls
Surnyi traces the way
cultural use overwrites
and re-calibrates indus
trial, residential and
commercial units. Lost
clothes, found objects,
arbitrary installations, and
accidental compositions
all reveal moments of
stability and imbalance
in temporarily inhabited
spaces.
i
x
Biographies

dm Albert
is an artist, living and working in
Budapest. He graduated from the
Hungarian University of Fine Arts
(Budapest), and he is currently
working on his DLA dissertation
at the doctoral programme at
HUFA . His works focus on the
following concepts: gallerypublic
space; artreality; and popular
culturehigh culture. His works
address current social anomalies
and highlight issues such as public
space as private space (someones
private space), surveillance (privacy
policy). He uses semantically con
densed and purified images, peculiar
pictograms, special flowcharts; his
works are mainly characterised by
minimalist aesthetics.

Gab Barthas
latest form of preoccupation with food
and fashion is market activism. She
is a founding member of a neighbour
hood activist group working to save,
raise awareness of and improve a
farmers market in downtown Budapest.
She has exhibited work and written
related to this and recently co-organi
sed a group show about food markets.
She has a background in art history.

Pedro Cid Proena, Sophie

Demay & Afonso Duarte
are a Luso-French graphic design
ensemble. They met while studying
at the Royal College of Art. They
have since been involved in various
projects, such as producing a book
in a gallery space, an international
non-school, a cinema building work
shop and an itinerant bookshop.

www.cestdudigital.info

Ders Csaba
gained spatial intelligence as an
architect first. Realised the limits of
his spatial approach on urban scale
as a visiting researcher in Columbia
University with the support of
the Fulbright Grant. Got a valuable
12
insight about the production of urban

systems in Bartlett, UCL. As a free
lancer advisor, currently he is working
on the emerging development model
of the Danube Strategy of Budapest.

Tmea Csaba
is an architect, urbanist and curator
based in Vienna. Working always
in interdisciplinary fields, she is focus
ing on movement strategies, from
the biggest scale as the migration of
urban population, till the smallest
detail as the play of fingertips in an
empty room. She is founding member
and member of the curator board
at KKHungarian Contemporary
Architecture Centre.

Beta Dvid
Ph.D., sociologist, senior researcher
at the Institute of Sociological
Research of the Hungarian Academy
of Sciences (MTA SZKI), professor
at the Veszprm College of Theology.
Areas of research: social network,
sociology of health, social cohesion
and family sociology.

has a background in industrial design
and photography, developing from
an early stage a strong interest in the
role of images and representation
within product design. In 2006 he
moved to London to study at the
Royal College of Art, where he received
his MA in product design under the
guidance of Jurgen Bey. He has since
set up his own studio and has con
ducted and collaborated on numerous
international design projects which
have exhibited in Sydney, Milan,
Barcelona, Tokyo, Amsterdam and
London. Bahbak lives and works
in East London.

www.bh-n.com

Edwin Heathcote
is an architect, critic and designer
living and working in London.
He is the Architecture and Design
11
Biographies
Critic of The Financial Times and

the author of over a dozen books on
architecture including London Caffs,
Theatre: London and Budapest:
A Guide to Twentieth Century
Architecture. He is half Hungarian
and has lived and worked in Budapest.
In 2001 he founded hardware
manufacturer iz, a word which
means thingy in Hungarian.

House of Jonn
House of Jonn is Jordan Hodgson,
Niall Gallacher and Nixolas Lobo
Brennan. They met while studying
Architecture at the RCA and formed
House of Jonn in London in 2009.
They have worked at various inter
national architecture practices in
London, New York, So Paulo, and
Zrich. Their work work is concerned
with architecture as a cultural practice
and the complex exigencies of the
contemporary city. These concerns
encompass both the everyday and
possible alternatives. Their work
includes both built structures and
images, and is produced out of a non
dogmatic design process.

www.houseofjonn.com

Bla Kli
is an architect, project manager
of Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis
latest work, the CET-Budapest
project. He graduated from ULB
University of Brussels, Victor
Horta Department of Architecture.
Currently he is undertaking his
MSc in Real Estate, Property Invest
ment and Management at Technical
University of Budapest and Trent
University of Nottingham, writing his
thesis on the rehabilitation possibi
lities of the old Jewish Quarter
of Budapest. He teaches contempo
rary architecture and interior design
at Werk Academy, Budapest.

Gergely Kovcs
is an architect working in London.
He studied in Budapest and at the
Architectural Association in London

where he is running workshops
currently. His recent project exploring
the spatial implications of the politics
of neutrality has won several awards
and been published widely.

Pter Lowas
is an artist and activist living and
working in Berlin and Pcs, Hungary.
Graduated at the Communication and
Media Department at the University
of Pcs. Co-founder of SmArt, a cultural
project where he has organised
experimental video/film festivals and
art events in Pcs. He is a member
of Lada project, is a Berlin based artist
run brand from 2007. His works are
based on found objects and footages
as well as on situative installations
addressing the idea of periphery, waste
and hermeneutic thinking.

Emoke
Kerekes & Anna Mzes

Emoke
is a Transilvanian born photo

grapher based in Budapest. Graduated
from Moholy-Nagy University of Art
and Design Budapest, with a Bachelor
of Photography degree in 2010. Anna
was born in Budapest, studies anima
tion at the Moholy-Nagy University of
Arts and Design.

Lszl Munten
is a Ph.D. candidate in American
Studies at Etvs Lornd University,
Hungary, writing his dissertation
on the commemoration of 9/1
1 in
literature and the fine arts. Since 2004
he has been assistant professor at
the Department of English at
Pzmny Pter Catholic University,
Hungary. He teaches 20th Century
American Literature and American
Architectural History. He also teaches
Hungarian Architectural History
to architecture students from the
University of San Francisco studying
in Budapest. His fields of interests
include urban space and memorials,
interrelations of text and image,
Biographies
20th century English and American
literature, and visual culture.

Deepa Naik
has worked with public works, Art for
Change and the Serpentine Gallery,
and has co-ordinated special projects
with Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths) including:
De-Regulation (MuHKA 2006, Herzliya
Museum of Contemporary Art 2006,
Berlin 2010); A.C.A.D.E.M.Y: Learning
from the Museum (Van Abbemuseum
2006); SUMMIT: non-aligned initiatives
in education culture (Multitude e.V.
2007); and Eye Witness Conference
(Birkbeck School of Law 2008). Guest
lectures include the Dutch Art Institute,
Art & Architecture, Chelsea College of
Art. She is currently editing Casting Off:
New Journeys in Visual Culture (2010)

Trenton Oldfields
work is pre-occupied with cities
including formal work within govern
ment, cultural and environmental
agencies and personal practice as
well as film, public art commissions,
research and guest lecturing.
He was Coordinator of the Thames
StrategyKew to Chelsea, Project
Manager at Cityside Regeneration,
a Community Development Worker
in North Kensington, and active on the
boards of the Westway Development
Trust, London Citizens and Subtext.
He is currently writing a book on the
socio-political history of fences and
their contemporary deployment in
Londons public spheres.

Levente Polyk
is lecturer at the Moholy-Nagy
University of Art and Design and at the
Budapest University of Technology
where he teaches urban studies and
architectural theory. Levente has
worked on urban projects for the
New York, Paris, Budapest and Pcs
municipalities, and as co-founder of
the KK-Hungarian Contemporary
Architecture Centre, he has organized
conferences and exhibitions on
10
contemporary urban phenomena.

His theoretical work focuses on the
intersections of art, architecture,
urbanism, geography and cinema.

studied Visual Communication at the
Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and
Design. Since 1997 his photography
has been exhibited in Budapest as
well as internationally. Since 2003 he
worked together with Lszl Gergely
photographer as Tehnica Schweiz,
posing questions about the active
participation of small communities
and interpersonal relationships in
the wider society. They are members
of POC (Piece of Cake,European
network for Contempeorary Images)
since 2007.

Rka Schutzmann
is a social worker who obtained
her diploma in 2008 on the College
of Theology in Veszprm. She received
the Scholarship of the Republic
of Hungary in 2006. Currently she
is a student at the Etvs Lrnd
University, Budapest (social policy).

Allan Siegel
studied initially architecture but
became involved in the experimental
filmmaking movement and subse
quently a founding member of the
documentary film collective Newsreel
and then was a co-director of Third
World Newseel. Besides working
as a filmmaker he is also a visual
media artist, writer and teacher.
His films have been presented at
major festivals in North America,
Europe and Asia and his visual media
at exhibitions in Budapest, Pcs,
Chicago, New York, Cheltenham
and Montreal. He taught for many
years at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago and lectured at other
universities in the United States.
Currently he is a lecturer in the
Intermedia Department at the
Hungarian University of Fine Arts
Biographies
and an Associate Editor of the journal

ARTMargins.

Eszter Steierhoffer
is an art historian and curator based
in London. She is a graduate of the
Curating Contemporary Art MA at the
Royal College of Art and previously
studied art history in Budapest
and in Italy, focusing on 20th and
21st century art and architecture.
Her current research concentrates
on a critical approach to curating
architecture. At present she is
directing the Art Network Agency
Program at the Hungarian Cultural
Centre in London.

Mikls Surnyi
graduated from the University of
Fine Arts in Budapest and worked on
digital and video projects and several
exhibitions oriented towards digital art.
Since 2004 he is working exclusively
with the media of photography. In 2006
he was awarded the Pcsi Jzsef
Grant for Photography, ever since he
exhibited widely in Budapest. In his
series of photographs he is building up
a strong connection, a quasi-narrative
context between pictures, yet he aspires
to have a story inherent also in
individual images.

Csilla Zsuzsanna Vizl
was born in 1978, Hungary. Received
the Hungarian Republican Scholarship
in 2007. Obtained a diploma in 2008
on the College of Theology in Veszprm
as social worker. Currently she is a
student on the Semmelweis University,
Budapest (social worker).
Biographies
Biographies
Biographies
Acknowledgements
With thanks to the authors, artists,

architects, designers, translators and
all participants. Special thanks to John
MacDonald, Cecilia Faduola, Leigh
Gravenor, Edward Quigley, Shelleyna
Rahman and Marco Torquati from
the Church Street Neighborhood
Management Team; to Alastair Rudd
without whom we would have never
found our way to Church Street.
Thanks to the whole team of the
Hungarian Cultural Centre, especially
to Ildik Takcs and Hanna Kiss
for their support and assistance.
For their generous help thanks to
Gergely Kovcs, Krisztin Mizun,
Eszter Ger, Theodore Thysiade and
Ben Freeman. Thanks to Nicholas
Lobo-Brennan and Bahbak HashemiNezhad for their extraordinary dedi
cation and involvement. For their
advice and contribution we thank
Anna Perczel, Mtys Srkzi, Attila
Fbri, Zsolt Szjrt, Mrton Szuhay,
Nra Somlydy, Rita Varga, va
Kovcs, Jack Tan, Janna Graham and
Amal Khalaf.
Research material for the Anatomy
of a Street project was collected
and organised by students of the
Sociology and Communication
Department at the Budapest University
of Technology and students of the
Institute of Theory in the Moholy-Nagy
University of Arts and Design.
Students of the Institute of Theory
in the Moholy-Nagy University of Arts
and Design: Sndor Balzs, Anna
Balzs, Judit Balogh, Tams Butora,
Dri Dobi, Dniel Eke, Tmea Ferth,
Krisztin Andrs Gal, Olivr Horvth,
Judit Huszr, Emoke
Kerekes, Johanna
Kbor, Anna Mzes, dm Nmeth,
Pter Lszl Rkosi, Beatrix Simk,
Zoltn Szab, Dniel Szoll
osi,
Balzs
S. Tth, Zsfia Trk, dm Ulbert
Students of the Sociology and
Communication Department at the
Budapest University of Technology:
Laura Andrsfay, Gabriella Auguszt,

Gyngyvr Balog, Tams Boros,
Lszl Balzs Csizik, Rbert Czitn,
Edit Fbin, Tams Fbin, Gabriella
Farkas, Zsuzsanna Fritz, Tams
Gray, Anita Hegeds, Mtl Hollai,
Judit Juhsz, Dniel Karvsz, Zita
Krisztina Kispl, Judit Klein, Sarolta
Olga Kocsi, Franciska Kollr, Krisztina
Eszter Komls, Mrta Kovch, Edina
Kucselata, Lna Liptk, Anett Lovszi,
Viktria Mrkus, Katalin Mavrk,
Glria Mszros, Dlia Molnr, Krisztina
Rdi, Dina Salamon, Pter Istvn
Sznth, Janka Dra Szatmri, Ildik
Tarls, Beta Varga.
Lastly, but by no means least, we would
like to thank the people of Church
Street who generously gave their time
to be interviewed.
Supported by
Colophon
Table of Contents
Anatomy of a Street is a
traveling research project and
exhibition curated by Levente
Polyk & Eszter Steierhoffer
Edited by Levente Polyk & Eszter
Steierhoffer
Translated from Hungarian
by Dniel Sipos
Proofread by Adele Eisenstein
Designed by Pedro Cid Proena,
Sophie Demay & Afonso Duarte
All images courtesy of the artists.
-Texts and images the authors

Chapter 1
Printed on a Risograph stencil
duplicator in June 2010 at Ditto
Press, Shacklewell Lane, Dalston,
London, in a run of 125 copies.

Chapter 1
Printed on Munken Pure Rough
100gsm and 170gsm and is set in
Berthold Akzidenz Grotesk Medium.
Chapter I

Eszter Steierhoffer
& Levente Polyk
108 Anatomy of a Street:

an introduction

96 Subject:

Re: furniture

House of Jonn
94 Subject:

Gallery Ephemera

Edwin Heathcote
92 Church and King

86 The surreal experience of trying

to address inequalities with

the logic that increased them

Allan Siegel
80 Notes on a street in transition

74 Shop-windows, an inventory

Ders Csaba
Bla Kli

54 Culs-de-sac of transformation:

the fate of central quarters after

privatisation
48 Mapping internal borders

of Kirly Street

38

Lszl Munten
Gab Bartha
The street as palimpsest:

the dialectics of preservation
and demolition in Budapests
Kirly Street
34 Re-thinking the marketplace:

a story of resistance and

proactivity

dm Albert, Bea Dvid, Rka Schutzmann

and Csilla Zsuzsanna Vizl
26

On the trace of the ring:

globalisation and real
estate on the most emblematic
(Buda)Pest street
Mikls Surnyi
16 Temporally inhabited space
70 Community Community space
14 Apendix
Designers
Afterword
Pter Lowas
62 Alternatives of active life

in the city of Pcs

Emoke
Kerekes & Anna Mzes
56 Vendors portraits,

Kirly street, Budapest

Pedro Cid Proena, Sophie Demay & Afonso Duarte
Afterword
Anatomy of a Street is a travelling exhibition and on-going
research project exploring sites of an accelerated urban
transformation.The first event runs from the 25 June to
the 4 July 2010 in Church Street, Paddington, London.

This publication does not attempt to represent that
which has not yet taken place; instead, the documents
here assembled, both text and images, act as a map of
the theoretical and geographical territories in which the
exhibition occurs.

Each stop on the exhibitions itinerary will result
in a new iteration of this book, which shall be extended,
chapter by chapter, with the documentation of the
previous event and clues as to what may follow, tracing a
chronological archive of the exhibitions path. It is, in this
sense, an object in flux, that reacts to its context and is
in a permanent state of liminality: documenting what just
occurred while, simultaneously, unfolding new possible
becomings like the moving landscapes it tries to
capture.

Anatomy of A Street

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Eszter Steierhoffer & Levente Polyk